The New Republic

The United States issued sanctions on the International Criminal Court Friday, just hours after President Donald Trump lost the Nobel Peace Prize to one of the institution’s former judges. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions cutting the court off from any U.S.-based financial services, technology companies, and U.S. currency. The Trump administration set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies to wind down their business with the war crimes tribunal. 

“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in a video statement on social media. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”

Rubio has previously argued the court has become “radical and extreme,” though Trump has outright admitted Rubio’s campaign against the ICC is meant to protect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  

U.S. officials maintained that these sanctions had been in the works for months, and the timing so close to the Nobel Prize award ceremony was merely coincidental, according to the Associated Press. But these sanctions are exactly the kind of petty behavior we’ve come to expect from a president who’s spent years begging for the prestigious award.

Instead, the award went to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer with a decades-long career. Last year, Pillar led a United Nations commission that found the Israeli government had committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Nobel committee said Thursday that Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”

Pillay took an immediate shot at Trump after she learned she had won the award Friday. “Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” she said, causing the room to erupt into laughter. 

Trump attacked the ICC after it issued arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders, including Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Since then, the U.S. has sanctioned court officials and prosecutors, as well as other international leaders who document and speak out about Israel’s crimes, including United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese.

The White House has chosen its new press secretary: MAGA communications adviser Katie Zacharia.

The 42-year-old was previously the senior communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social. The news of Zacharia’s ascension to the White House inner ring was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by CBS News.

Zacharia will replace Karoline Leavitt, who exited the role in August to join Fox News as an on-air contributor.

This is a developing story.

Even Republican lawmakers are disgusted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream a federal execution.

Hegseth confirmed Thursday that the Pentagon plans to livestream the military firing squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Obviously Democrats were outraged by the plan, but even a few Republicans weren’t on board with turning state-sponsored murder into a spectacle.

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis said that Hegseth’s decision was “beyond disgusting.”

“Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America,” he wrote in a post on X. In his new book, Tillis wrote that confirming Hegseth was the “biggest regret” of his career.

Georgia Representative Austin Scott also opposed the decision. “I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” he wrote on X, referring to the violent Islamist ideology.

In a response to Hegseth on X, former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger put it more bluntly: “There will be a day, and soon, when nobody will acknowledge even knowing you.”

Meanwhile, Laura Loomer, the self-proclaimed Islamophobe who advises the president, voiced her support for the plan straight out of an extremist’s playbook.

“[Hegeseth] is amazing. Truly amazing. I can’t wait to watch Nidal Hasan’s live-streamed execution for his act of Islamic terrorism. We are very lucky to have [Hegseth] ! I voted for more dead jihadists!” she wrote on X. In reality, she voted to make our country more like the violent regimes she claims to hate.

Internationally, public executions are rare, but still occur in Afghanistan and Iran, according to The Guardian. In 2025, the Taliban carried out six public executions, and the Islamic Republic carried out 11.

Senate candidate Ken Paxton took nearly 1,000 business trips during his tenure as Texas Attorney General, costing taxpayers millions of dollars along the way. Only one in six of them actually had to do with work.

A new report from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune shows that Paxton has taken almost 1,000 trips out of state since 2015, accompanied by Texas police each time at a cost of $3.3 million to his constituents. His security detail alone cost $24,000 a month, while his predecessor Greg Abbott’s cost $7,400 a month. Of those 1,000 trips, research only linked 138 of them to actual business. In fact, Paxton didn’t even record them as such.

Paxton took 53 trips to Florida, 24 trips to Utah—where his family trust owns properties—and 19 trips out of the country, all on the taxpayer’s dime. Paxton did not offer any specific explanation for his lack of business records for the trips.

“Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas,” said his office in a statement. “Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.”

Beyond being a blatant misuse of public funds, especially given how many trips he took to his properties, this is a sign that Paxton cares more about his political office and its perks than he does about his actual constituents, who are paying for those perks.

“If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” former National Association of Attorneys General executive director Chris Toth told ProPublica. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.”

Paxton has been followed by crises of his own making for the entirety of his time as attorney general, as well as his candidacy for Senate. From his indictment and suspension, to his alleged affair and subsequent divorce, and then his controversial, leak-filled Senate campaign, the GOP couldn’t have chosen a weaker candidate to field against James Talarico in Texas to defend their Senate majority.

With a bit of luck, this midterm election could finally break what we might call the Myth of Multiracial MAGA. That pervasive notion held that Trump’s 2024 gains with Latinos heralded the birth of a new multiethnic working-class coalition anchored around right wing populist ideas. In the ultimate humiliation for liberals, that included immigration restrictionism.

A fresh blow to this notion came this week with an NBC poll finding Trump’s approval with Latinos sinking to 27 percent, and Democrats leading among them in the generic matchup by 59-35. But such polls capture only half the story. The other factor to consider? Latino turnout.

A new analysis by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart—which we obtained before its release—demonstrates something striking: As of right now, the Latino share of the early vote is dramatically outpacing where it was at the equivalent moment in both 2022 and 2024.

Here’s the truly wild finding: The raw number of early Latino votes is outpacing the raw total of them at the same point in 2024. That’s a surprise, because 2024 was a presidential year, when voter turnout is traditionally much higher, especially among nonwhites. Yet more Latinos have voted as of now—in this midterm—than at this point in the last presidential cycle.

TargetSmart’s analysis looked at the 229 counties across the country that are currently reporting early votes, mostly concentrated in states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virgina, New Jersey, and Florida.

Here’s the first key finding on vote share:

As you can see, as of October 8, Latinos comprise nearly 8 percent of the early vote in those 229 counties, substantially higher than the percentages in 2022 and 2024, per TargetSmart’s analysis. Those gains amount to big numbers, as the second key finding on raw vote totals shows:

That graphic is remarkable. As of October 8, according to the analysis, nearly 112,000 Latinos have voted, versus the approximately 106,000 who cast votes by the same time in the presidential year of 2024.

“While it’s still early, it’s incredibly unusual to see any group outperform presidential turnout at this point in the cycle,” Tom Bonier, a senior adviser at TargetSmart, told me. “Latino turnout tends to drop more in midterms. So seeing this early surge suggests we’ll potentially see historic levels of Latino engagement.”

What’s driving all this? The economy is likely the primary driver: The NBC poll found 74 percent of Latinos nationally disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Latinos prefer Democrats to Republicans on the issue by 21 points—a huge turnaround from 2024, when Trump narrowly led Kamala Harris among Latinos on it.

But immigration also looms large. NBC finds 69 percent of Latinos disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration and 58 percent disapprove on border security. Even the Republican pollster who helps conduct NBC’s poll says the issue is a big factor driving Latinos to Democrats.

Indeed, TargetSmart’s analysis also finds that many counties with the largest spikes in Latino turnout are also ones subjected to high-profile ICE activity. “Communities that have been directly impacted by ICE actions are generally seeing the largest increases in turnout,” Bonier said.

Here is a big caveat: We’re at the outset of early voting, so we’ll know more when early-vote tallies arrive from states like Texas, California, and New York and Pennsylvania, which will shed light on the Texas Senate races and many House races concentrated in those states.

Nick Ahamed, managing director of Equis Research, also cautions against reading too much into the early vote because we can’t be certain how it’ll break down. But Equis research finds that Latinos comprise more than 10 percent of eligible voters in 20 competitive House districts and more than 20 percent in a dozen of those districts. Given the NBC poll showing Democrats with a 24-point lead among them, Latinos could heavily influence the outcome.

“If Democrats regain Latino support at levels we’re seeing in the polling, we expect Democrats to win in many of those 20 districts,” Ahamed told me. He noted that Equis research also shows Trump’s handling of costs and immigration are key drivers of Latino interest in voting.

MAGA as a movement probably has plenty of staying power even if the midterms are a disaster for Trump. But nonetheless, all this could matter a great deal for 2028. Even with Democrats winning Congressional power, Trump will still have his ICE army at his command. While one hopes ICE will be partly constrained by Democrats in Congress, it’ll still have a huge pile of money and lots of heavy weaponry. And Trump will still control immigration policy.

Yes, Latinos constitute a swingy constituency and Democrats can’t take them for granted in 2028 even if they win big this fall. But it’s hard to see JD Vance recapturing many of them as long as they continue getting brutalized by Trump’s economy and deportation paramilitary. This Latino move back to Democrats, if it becomes a full-scale shift, may deal a blow to MAGA long past the midterms.

Trump and MAGA have pulled off some astounding political sleight-of-hand. They have openly advertised that their ideological goal is ethnic cleansing, recruiting ICE agents and saturating official government communications with explicit white-nationalist appeals. Yet they also succeeded for a time in selling this agenda to Latinos as purely about law enforcement and public safety. This straddle was critical to sustaining notions of MAGA as a multiracial movement.

But Trump’s catastrophic economic failures and violent anti-immigrant horrors have rendered that balancing act impossible to sustain. We can’t be certain all this is driving the Latino early-voting surge, but it sure looks plausible. If this early trend holds—and if Latinos help deliver a resounding Democratic victory—that chart on raw vote totals will have captured what may be the beginning of the end.

Katie Miller, the wife of American deportation czar Stephen Miller, has reignited the convivial traditions of Washington’s elite by throwing grandiose bashes at the military base where her family abruptly moved. But there’s a searing reason why the MAGA couple sticks to hosting at home: They’re not welcome anywhere else in town.

A tell-all published Thursday by Vanity Fair revealed the glitz and glam of Miller’s over-the-top parties, which have at times included donkeys, food trucks, hibachi chefs, a mechanical bull, and dozens of famed guests. 

It’s not uncommon to find nearly all of the presidential Cabinet in attendance, either. Frequent partygoers include the Rubios, the Hegseths, the Burgums, as well as FBI Director Kash Patel and his fiancée, Alexis Wilkins. The high-flying guest list has sparked jokes that the Trump administration might need a “designated survivor” to outlast Miller’s soirees, according to one regular attendee who spoke with Vanity Fair.

But whereas the Capitol wives of old would throw bipartisan get-togethers to bridge the divides of Washington politics, the Millers appear to be hiding from their detractors. Sequestered at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall—where they moved to escape the protests plaguing them in their old neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia—the Millers have found a way to revel and play away from public ire.

“They need to do something to blow off steam because they’re not welcome in public,” another party guest told the magazine. “They can’t go to any venue without being assaulted. They have to do this stuff in Camelot.”

But accepting an invitation from Katie Miller doesn’t necessarily imply a fondness for the couple. At least one longtime Trump ally told Vanity Fair that Stephen Miller’s despotic reputation is a part of the calculation.  

“I’ll say I love her publicly, but the truth is I can’t fucking stand her,” the ally said. “But if she asks you to go on the podcast, or come over for dinner, you say yes, because Stephen Miller is the second-most powerful person in the world.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Thursday shooting of an unarmed man on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s words rather than the agent’s actions.

“I wanna push back on a couple things. The Mayor yesterday did a press conference.…He said that ICE ‘has killed more of our neighbors than they claim to have saved.’ That’s a direct quote from the Mayor last night,” Mullin said with anger in his voice. “Just for a record here: Right now ICE has in detention 258 illegals that are wanted for murder charges just in New York alone.… [the mayor’s] words are dangerous, and incite hostility. It doesn’t help.”

Mullin points to Mamdani’s view on ICE—which the vast majority of Americans share—as harmful rather than the violent actions of ICE itself. On Thursday, ICE shot and wounded 28-year-old Dominican man Oscar Belgal in the neck while he was driving with a 5-year-old child in the backseat in New York City’s Marble Hill, discharging seven rounds at Belgal. ICE claims he “weaponized” his car against them after they boxed him in. Mamdani unsuccessfully negotiated for Belgal’s release.

According to Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Belgal was rushed by plainclothed ICE officers with their guns already drawn.

“They wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces. There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents,” Mamdani said.

Mullin’s comments were not well received.

“His words are dangerous and incite hostility—says the man in charge of the masked, armed, thugs violating Constitutional rights, and attacking and killing people in the streets,” Executive Director of the Campaign for New York Health Melanie D’Arrigo wrote on X.

At least 40 people have been shot by ICE since the start of Trump’s second term, with 11 of those being fatal.

Nothing Mullin or anyone from DHS leadership says should be taken seriously. Whatever statistics Mullin spouts are easily outweighed by the images Americans have seen of masked, disguised federal agents roaming their streets, terrorizing and killing their neighbors. ICE agents dressed in construction gear ambushing a man and firing at him seven times with a child in the car in the middle of the day is absurd, and Mullin has no real justification for it—leading him to deflect to Mamdani.

President Donald Trump is still going after Federal Reserve Commissioner Lisa Cook.

In a presidential memo Wednesday, Trump announced that he’d set up a committee to oversee an investigation into whether Cook had made false statements in connection to one or more mortgage agreements.

“As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” he wrote.

Of course, Cook isn’t really Trump’s subordinate. In June, the Supreme Court blocked Cook’s removal, finding that the government had not afforded her due process. The ruling temporarily preserved the Federal Reserve’s independence.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump from trying to oust Cook. In August, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino informed her that the Trump administration was once again “considering” removing her from her position.

It’s been more than a year since Trump first claimed that Cook—the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board—had committed mortgage fraud by having two primary residences. Cook refused to step down and sued, stating that “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.”

Notably, Trump’s own mortgage agreements appear to match the same criteria his Department of Justice has used to go after Cook, as well as Trump’s other perceived enemies, former Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump said the new committee will meet next month to “consider the evidence and allegations against Governor Cook.” Cook has not been charged with any crime.

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Inside Washington

Why Kansas might do the unthinkable and vote blue

A perfect storm could be brewing in Kansas to elect a Democratic senator for the first time since 1932. Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton’s skills as a candidate, experts say, combined with uniquely bad conditions for the state’s farmers, could be the right ingredients for an upset. The problem is numbers: Registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in the state almost two to one.

“If there was ever a chance to elect a Democratic senator, this is it,” said Dan Glickman, who served as agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton and represented Kansas’s 4th congressional district in the House for 18 years. A large part of that is because of Hamilton’s biography. As pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, he leads the largest Methodist congregation in the country, consisting of 24,000 members. Hamilton estimates that some 9,000 of those are Republicans, 9,000 are Democrats, and between 6,000 and 7,000 are independents.

“Being a pastor of a massive church, you have to be a pretty darn good politician to keep your job,” Glickman said. “There’s probably more attention on the pastor than there is on the governor or the senator.”

Recent polls have shown a shockingly close race. Some, like a YouGov poll conducted at the end of September, found Hamilton up three points against his competitor, incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall. An obstetrician-gynecologist, Marshall has held the seat since 2021. He recently came under fire when The New York Times reported that he had sued more than 700 patients who carried unpaid bills, and 81 of those patients were arrested. When the Times asked about the arrests, Marshall’s campaign said that judges issue warrants, not doctors.

Marshall, who is endorsed by Trump, is also struggling under the weight of the president’s expensive tariff policies and the war in Iran. Trump is deeply unpopular even in red Kansas, where he is 15 points underwater. Democrats are betting some conservative farmers, as a result, could stay home, and some might even vote blue, giving Hamilton an opening to unseat Marshall.

“A lot of times, farmers tend to keep their politics close to their chest,” said Nick Levendofsky, executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union. “But I am hearing a lot of rumblings all across not just the state of Kansas but across the country.” Levendofsky joined 250 farmers from all around the U.S. for the National Farmers Union legislative fly-in to Washington, D.C., in September. “You could feel the tension when we went to USDA, when we went into these meetings with members of Congress.”

With the fall harvest season underway, the increased costs of diesel and fertilizer caused by the Iran war are now hitting extra hard. Harvesting equipment requires diesel. And in the next few weeks, Kansas farmers who grow winter wheat will begin planting, requiring more diesel and fertilizer. “It’s a double whammy,” Levendofsky said. Diesel price hikes are likely to add an extra $20,000 to $30,000 to a grain farmer’s expenses this year, estimated Gregory Ibendahl, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University. Farmers, who are price takers, have no way to pass that expense on and will simply have to eat the extra cost.

That doesn’t necessarily mean farmers will turn on Marshall, Ibendahl cautioned. “The administration is very good about having extra ad hoc payments beyond the typical Farm Bill payments,” he explained, which can help farmers make ends meet. Marshall may very well benefit by association with President Donald Trump in the eyes of farmers receiving those funds. 

But meanwhile, Kansas ranchers are deeply frustrated by Trump’s policies on beef imports. In 2025, Trump announced a plan to bring Argentine beef into the country to lower grocery prices. In late August, Trump announced a plan to ease tariffs on beef imports through the election, drawing the ire of Kansas cattle ranchers. “The answer to increasing prices in grocery stores isn’t selling out American farmers and ranchers to buy votes in November,” Glenn Brunkow, president of the Kansas Farm Bureau, told the Kansas Reflector at the time. Both Marshall and Hamilton criticized Trump’s decision.

Now Hamilton is traveling across the state, including through its more red, agriculture-heavy counties, trying to connect with the kinds of voters who haven’t elected a Democratic senator in nearly a century. “We haven’t elected Democratic senators in a long time,” Glickman said, “but there’s no reason that can’t happen this time.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The drip-drip-drip of leaks from Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s remarks at a private fundraiser continues. This time, The Texas Tribune reports that Paxton, when asked about the federal deficit, said legislators will need to make “some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending.” Mandatory spending, the Tribune’s Kayla Guo notes, is made up largely of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while in the most recent fiscal year, “much of the rest covered aid to lower-income families, such as food benefits and unemployment insurance, and a mix of retirement and disability benefits for federal workers and veterans.” Paxton didn’t elaborate on which programs he’d axe, at least in the clip that was shared with the Tribune. 

James Talarico’s team quickly posted the news to X on Thursday, saying, “Ken Paxton plans to cut Social Security and Medicare. He’s telling seniors to ‘suck it up’ while he owns 15 homes and increases his net worth up to $27 million.” Paxton, meanwhile, has reacted to the news by affirming his support for Social Security and saying that “the fake news keeps spinning the same cherry-picked audio to mislead Texans and take my words out of context. I have never said I would take away entitlements from those who deserve or earned them.” (Note, however, the suggestive wording at the end of that sentence.)

Elsewhere:

• Millions are under hurricane warning as Isaias approaches the Gulf Coast on Friday. This has been an unusually mild hurricane season so far—which has been a very good thing, because both disaster preparedness and weather forecasting are in an unusually chaotic state following two years of budget cuts and unusual leadership decisions under the Trump administration. Republican Governors Kay Ivey of Alabama and Ron DeSantis of Florida have already declared a state of emergency in select counties, and Governor Brian Kemp has declared an emergency for the state of Georgia.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

At Policy Matters Ohio, George Boas argues against the recently implemented 90-day gas tax suspension, saying it’s “misguided in at least three critical ways: It will have only a small, temporary impact on gas prices; it drains the budget at a time when schools, childcare, and healthcare are already badly underfunded or facing massive federal cuts; and it fails to address the root of the problem.” Better proposals, he adds, would include “targeted property-tax relief for Ohioans who need it most,” “strong consumer protections and data-center regulations to keep Ohioans from bearing an unfair share of rising electricity costs,” affordable childcare, pro-worker legislation, and more. 

Data for Progress released a new survey that found 67 percent of voters “say they support the U.S. having a refugee program”—a number that jumps to 90 percent for people who personally know a refugee. The survey also found widespread opposition to recent immigration enforcement actions.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: Road salt

Maine’s Senate race has given the nation no end of agita, but it finally delivered a moment worthy of the outsize attention when Susan Collins, bragging that she’d convinced Trump to stand down on his plans to put a tariff on road salt, was hit by this rejoinder from her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson: “We can’t eat road salt.” Jackson is no paragon of charisma, so we hesitate to call it a zinger. But the humble de-icing material conjured the kind of relatable, of-the-moment idea that usually eludes the grasp of an inanimate object. Could it be a game-changer? Elections have hinged on dumber things, that’s for sure.

Bad Week: Kimberly Guilfoyle

From the moment a pair of wayward Canary Island mastiffs thrust her into the public consciousness, no one could have imagined the story arc of U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle—the onetime paramour of Gavin Newsom turned “Mar-a-Lago face” cautionary tale. Now we’re left to wonder: Does her story end here? This week, a trove of private leaks revealed that she’d been attempting to do some Trump administration favor-trading in return for a $100,000 donation straight to her Amex card to pay a bill. It raises a host of questions: What could she have blown that kind of money on? How much of that was spent on the latest pan-Hellenic couture from Zeus+Dione? And most importantly, who hates her enough to leak this stuff? If you’re that person, contact us on Signal.

—Jason Linkins

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

How many U.S. states allow death by firing squad? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

Republican Representative Mike Collins cannot seem to rise above his staffers’ Nazi reputations.

The Georgia representative practically drowned under reports of his team’s ties to extremism during the state’s first debate against Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff Thursday, unable to bat away the various white supremacist connections within his orbit.

“Mike Collins has brought dishonor to our state through his personal bigotry and his widely documented ties to white nationalists,” Ossoff said in his opening remarks.

At least four of Collins’s former staffers and aides have been accused of extremist affiliations. They include Collins’s former chief of staff Kip Talley, former digital director William Paul (the son of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul), and a former intern, Preston Parra (who has frequently shared Ku Klux Klan and Nazi images to his personal social media account, including an image of himself clad in the white supremacist groups’ hooded uniform).

“You hired half the Third Reich to staff your office,” Ossoff remarked at one point.

But the hate bled even closer to home: CNN revealed in July that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, was a white supremacist influencer that had shared vitriolic, extremist messaging across the internet.

Collins, however, could not seem to confront the allegation head on without blaming his Democratic opponent.

“That’s my family. The craziness that Jon Ossoff has been spewing out there—I actually had a person put in jail this weekend, because he not only wanted to kill my son-in-law but he wanted to kill me,” Collins said when asked directly about his son-in-law’s social media activity. “I’ve condemned racism, antisemitism, hate. I don’t care where the source is, and I tell him that, too. It’s wrong.”

Collins then falsely equivalated his son-in-law’s hateful messaging to Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, complaining that Ossoff had not condemned either.

Ossoff’s response: “Imagine running for the U.S. Senate while neo-Nazi propaganda is disseminated to an audience of millions from your home. That’s Mike Collins.”

The Democratic incumbent also railed against Collins’s own track record, recalling when Collins “cheered on” a group of young men that harassed a Black woman at the University of Mississippi with monkey sounds, and that Collins himself had “amplified neo-Nazi propaganda.”

“If John Lewis were marching today,” Ossoff said, “Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement  agent at the scene who opened fire into a vehicle with a five-year-old child Thursday has an alleged history of making violent arrests.

In a violent incident Thursday afternoon, plainclothes federal immigration agents fired at least seven rounds into a car in Marble Hill, a residential neighborhood of New York City. Inside the vehicle sat Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old Bronx resident and a five-year-old boy, believed to be his son, Gothamist reported. Belgal was shot in the neck and hospitalized, and the child was reportedly unharmed.

Wired identified Brendan Cuni as one of the ICE officers present during the incident. Photographs from the scene showed Cuni in the aftermath of the shooting, wearing a high-visibility yellow construction vest, and carrying an AR-15–style rifle. He was disguised as a construction worker, and was in no way identifiable as a federal agent.

Cuni has been named in multiple lawsuits alleging violent arrests in New York City and beyond, Wired reported. Last October, a Bronx man claimed that Cuni tripped him hard enough to crack a tooth, and used a Taser on him six times while he was already handcuffed on the ground. In November, Cuni was involved in an arrest in Queens where ICE agents reportedly tackled and shocked a man with a Taser. In December, Cuni was deployed in Minneapolis as part of Operation Metro Surge. Activists allege that he was among officers who forced a pregnant woman to the ground, though this was not confirmed by Wired. During his stint in the Midwest, prosecutors charged a man with assaulting Cuni, but a judge found there was “weak” evidence, and no other agents could corroborate Cuni’s story. In at least three separate cases, judges have found issues with Cuni’s statements or arrest paperwork.

Protesters gathered outside of the local hospital where Belgal was taken. “Don’t forget, don’t forgive, Brendan Cuni shot a kid!” they chanted, according to a video shared on X by The Intercept’s Noah Horowitz.

At a press conference Thursday night, Democratic Representative Adriano Espaillat said that he’d attempted to visit Belgal in the hospital but had been blocked by federal agents. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that ICE had taken Belgal into custody, and that his discussions with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to have him released had been “unsuccessful.”

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Belgal had a previous criminal conviction, multiple prior arrests, and ties to a violent gang.

Barbarism surrounds us. ICE thugs have once again shot a man, firing at least five shots while he was in his car with his five-year-old son in New York City. Our incompetent and offensive “secretary of war” announces that the United States of America is going to livestream the execution by firing squad of a mass killer. Public executions are against international law. Amnesty International reports that in 2025, there were 17 public executions in the world. Eleven were in Iran, and six in Afghanistan. Great.

At least America is now fully starting to recognize what a moral cesspool Donald Trump and his cronies have made of this country. A new poll out from Pew has Trump’s approval at 30 percent and his disapproval at a stunning 68 percent. Can he get into the 20s before November 3? It sure seems that way. Does he really think, as The Atlantic reported this week, that bombing Iran before the election will help his numbers? He’s really so delusional as to believe that escalating a deeply unpopular war would lead to people rallying around the flag?

Against all this, most Democratic elected officials still haven’t found the right words to encapsulate all this corruption and rot. One Democrat, though, continues to stand out above all the others. If you haven’t yet seen some of the clips of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s evisceration of his GOP challenger in last night’s debate, you need to watch them. The guy is a virtuoso—Bernstein with a baton, Jordan with a basketball.

The imperishable line that will be remembered, I think, for a long, long time, came when Ossoff said of Representative Mike Collins and his white supremacist and far-far-right ties: “It’s not just that you’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office,” but you’re supporting policies that are “robbing your constituents to pay your donors.” Then came another killer, which is also so good that it would be the takeaway line for most debaters: “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”

That’s how you do it, folks. And make no mistake: It took some guts for Ossoff to decide to make his central attack on Collins his racism. There’s no guarantee, even in 2026, that a liberal Jewish Democrat could make that stick against a Republican in the state of Georgia. But Ossoff has pressed the point of Collins’s bigotry relentlessly. This is not someone who consulted polls and focus groups and listened to consultants telling him to keep the focus on Collins’s position on prescription drug prices. This is someone who asked himself, What is my opponent’s core moral flaw? and who went right at it with both barrels.

He’s almost certainly going to win, and possibly by a lot. And in doing so, in making his opponent’s bigotry his central line of attack, he’s doing something too many Democrats are gun-shy about doing these days: He took aim right at the heart of MAGA-ism, and he’s doing it without qualification or equivocation. And that’s why so many Democrats are so impressed by him.

As I wrote of Ossoff back in August, after his delicious barb about “Natalie” (Harp, the Trumpy amanuensis): “He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral.” He did that last night, but he also did even more. Saying “half the Third Reich” is, among other things, really funny. It’s wildly hyperbolic, of course, but that too is the point.

It’s the kind of rhetoric the right has been using against Democrats for many years now. Back in 2004, I recall the right-wing Club for Growth launching a broadside against Howard Dean saying that he should “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” No Democrat would ever have said then that George W. Bush should “take his tax-cutting, government-hating, beer-swilling, brisket-eating, pickup truck–driving, Branson-loving right-wing freak show back to Texas where it belongs” anymore than any Democratic president would have suggested—twice in one week—that maybe Iran should bomb Birmingham or Tulsa.

That just wouldn’t work in reverse, for reasons having to do with which Americans the media deems to be “real.” But what does work, when Trump’s at 30 percent in the polls and more than half the nation is disgusted with him, is doing what Ossoff is doing: making moral cases against Republicans’ very obvious and offensive moral failings.

He says he has no interest in running for president. Who knows. And of course if he does run, we’ll have to take stock of his positions on a busload of issues. But liberals can be too focused on positions, and on candidates, especially presidential candidates, passing a range of litmus tests. Ossoff is from Georgia, not Massachusetts, so he has to be careful about some stuff. He may not check some boxes. But his rhetoric suggests that there’s a potential unchained Ossoff somewhere in there just waiting to burst out, an Ossoff who might be willing to take more aggressive positions while seeking national office. For now, while he’s not the front-runner in the 2028 polls or the betting markets, he is for my money the person most likely to catch fire and be satisfactory to enough progressives and enough moderates to bring the party together after what will probably be another fractious primary.

In the meantime, let’s just appreciate what he did last night. Democrats, we need more of that.

Navi Pillay, the winner of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, took an immediate shot at President Trump after she learned she had won the award Friday.

The former South African judge and United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner gave an impromptu speech at Nuremberg Court in Germany, where she was attending an academic and legal conference after she received the news.

“Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” she said. The room erupted in laughter.

Trump has been practically begging for a Nobel Peace Prize for years, especially since it was awarded to then-President Barack Obama in 2009. Last year, he phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” to ask about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.

“Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS,” Trump said in another message to Norway Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Last October, Trump told the press “They gave it to Obama for absolutely destroying our country” during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb. “My election was much more important.”

This year, Trump has pretended to stop caring about the award altogether, although that may change when he gets wind of Pillay’s comments.

“Just to be at this venue… Your applause means a great deal to me. You don’t want to receive an award, prize, or anything, unless the public agrees that you deserve this. So that’s how I appreciate your applause today,” Pillay said in her remarks. “Being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify [this announcement]. I think it’s very appropriate that I’m with friends and colleagues, all of whom support human rights. The last thing I did [was] the delivery of the report on Gaza naming what’s happening there as genocide.”

Amazing moment. Navi Pillay has received the Nobel Peace Prize ! https://t.co/HL3r1PJzLO We are at the Nuremberg Court; I cannot think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize. We are all so thrilled! This is her first reactions upon hearing the news: https://t.co/Crbj6XdiyQ

— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) October 9, 2026

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump has been furious at Fox News for many months now, and he just raged at the network again this week. But his fury is backfiring. We’re now learning that the White House and senior Republicans waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to get Fox to stop covering Abdul El-Sayed the way it had been, because it was making him into a stronger candidate. That’s humiliating enough, but it also captures a lot about Trump and MAGA right now: the belief that Fox should function as their twenty-four-seven propaganda operation, the shock that many voters aren’t perceiving El-Sayed in accordance with MAGA smears, and the ways in which all these manly MAGA men devolve into pathetic whiners when the going gets just a little hard.

Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, has a good piece all about MAGA whininess today, so we’re talking to her about all of it. Jen, always good to have you on.

Jennifer Rubin: It’s great to be here, Greg.

Sargent: So Trump’s been in a fury with Fox News for months. He hates their polling, which shows Democrats on the cusp of winning Senate races in deep red states. This week Trump raged as follows: “Fox News spends more time covering the jihadist and Democrat candidates than they do the good old-fashioned Republicans. All they talk about is Democrat jihadists like El-Sayed.”

Trump slammed Fox’s Martha MacCallum for a softball interview, and he also slammed Fox for not covering his rallies to his liking. Jen, your thoughts on all that?

Rubin: Well, Trump is very upset that Fox is trying to save him from himself, and trying to save the Republicans from this grossly unpopular president. It is true. They are madly cutting away from his rallies, because they are so nuts. They are so discordant.

He is blowing up New York and San Diego. He is railing on unregulated data centers, which is the kiss of death for candidates. He is going off on veganism. He is so nuts, so out of control, that Fox does not want to put him on. Their rationale is, we’ve got to elect Republicans. We can’t have them seeing our crazy commander in chief.

Sargent: Yeah, what’s funny about that is that Trump is completely incapable of imagining that showing Trump’s rallies might hurt Republican candidates. That to me is really amusing. In Trump’s head, all attention is good. You’re winning when you’re the center of attention. But he is the kiss of death for many of these candidates now.

Rubin: Exactly. His poll numbers have fallen off the cliff. And on all of these issues that he keeps repeating—if Republicans adopt them, they go down in the polls and they get killed. Data centers, not popular. Trump insisting affordability is not a real issue. If Republicans say that stuff, they get laughed at.

And you know who thinks Trump is bad? JD Vance. JD Vance is no longer using the world’s-greatest-economy line. He is beginning to tiptoe away and say, well, we know things are hard, give us another shot. He can see the writing on the wall.

He may be a radical racist, but he’s not stupid. He can read the polls. And with Trump’s demise and the demise of the Republican Party, he can see his own 2028 prospects evaporating.

Sargent: Here’s where the stuff about Fox News gets really rich. Axios reports that Republicans have privately griped to Fox for months over their coverage of El-Sayed. They say this helps El-Sayed, complicating their efforts to portray him as out of the mainstream. And White House officials privately reached out to Fox this week to complain about that interview of him.

Jen, let me translate this. What they really mean is, if Fox lets El-Sayed talk, it becomes a lot harder to smear him as a scary radical jihadist, because people see who he actually is, right?

Rubin: That’s right. And this is the beauty of candidates like El-Sayed, like Pete Buttigieg, who can go on Fox, because they debunk the lies and the smears. So you’re right. It wasn’t that it was a particularly softball interview. It was just that he steamrolled right over her.

And all the lies that they live with, the crazy conspiracies, the smears—when they hit reality, when you actually see the candidate, when you hear the candidate, anybody, even a Fox viewer, can tell that this is just a lie.

Sargent: There’s another great detail from this reporting. Top GOP operatives repeatedly contacted Fox executives and producers, complaining that Jesse Watters of Fox had commented on El-Sayed in a way that could allow him to portray himself as moderate. Again, translation: by all means, Fox News, don’t tell the truth about this guy. We can’t win the election if you do that. I just love it.

Rubin: It also shows, by the way, the degree to which not even Fox can keep up with the lies and the smears. Trump is so far out of reality, and the MAGA view of Democrats is so divorced from reality, that they can’t possibly construct any kind of, quote, news program that follows the plot. It’s impossible.

The Democrats have, I think, been so down on themselves and on their brand that they failed to realize how utterly insane and incapable the Republicans are of constructing a narrative that makes any sense.

Sargent: Absolutely. And I want to play an ad from Mike Rogers, who’s the Republican opponent of El-Sayed in Michigan. Listen to him talking here about Trump’s tariffs and his trade war with Canada. This is Mike Rogers, the Republican.

Mike Rogers (voiceover): Drinking a Labatt and watching the Red Wings, man, it just doesn’t get any more Michigan than that. And here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end this tariff war.

Sargent: That’s really remarkable stuff, Jen. He says straight out that interdependence with Canada is a good thing, and Canada is not the enemy that Trump is depicting. Of course, you might note something here, which is that Mike Rogers doesn’t happen to mention who is starting this trade war with Canada, who’s conducting this trade war with Canada.

He forgot to mention that part. It’s his party that’s doing it. It’s the leader of his party. But still, that is a real sign of Trump’s toxicity, if in a Midwestern state the Republican has to aggressively become Mr. Globalist all of a sudden.

Rubin: Exactly. And this is happening all over the place. Look at the Republicans who are running against the war that they’ve repeatedly voted to give Trump a blank check to operate. So now they want the war to end. Now they don’t like the trade war. What’s next? Saying the big bad bill was a rotten thing?

I mean, this is what happens. They are now caught in what you and I have been saying all along. These positions are politically untenable. They’re not just untenable in blue areas. They’re untenable in red states, in red districts. No one’s in favor of these policies, and they’ve backfired.

So what’s next? I want to get out of the war because Trump has driven up gas prices? Well, that would be honest, but unfortunately they haven’t voted that way.

Sargent: Well, yeah, I mean, a number of them are essentially trying to adopt that as their position. In your piece, you identified a pattern in which a lot of manly MAGA figures are getting quite whiny as this election approaches. One example you gave is JD Vance begging voters to give Republicans a second chance. You also pointed out that Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, recently complained that he’s not in charge of his own campaign. As you pointed out, James Talarico is supposed to be the low-T guy, but Paxton’s claiming he’s helplessly controlled by others. That’s just crazy.

Rubin: And Trump is the worst of them. Now his favorite complaint is, there are reports—and we’re going to throw these reporters in jail—for saying there are empty seats at my rallies. He says, no, people are moving down to fill in the seats. Wait a second. How do you fill in a seat if it’s not empty? That logic escapes him.

But this is what happens when the, quote, strongmen meet reality. Suddenly they are humiliated. They are perceived as weak, as unpopular, and they are becoming unglued. And we are seeing this. So now they whine. They complain. They go running to Fox.

I’m sorry, but maybe the reason that a lot of white men are no longer turning out is that they don’t like all this crybaby activity. His own ability to respond to the criticism is so degraded, because his mind is turning to shit, that he is unable to even mount any kind of comeback. No wonder Fox won’t put him on the air.

Sargent: So you mentioned the strongman dimension to all this, and I want to pick up on that. Like, you see this same dynamic at play with all these depictions of Donald Trump as this manly, virile young figure—like all these memes that paste these young muscular bodies on Trump’s head.

And meanwhile, he’s falling asleep at meetings. I mean, that is like the perfect example of the sort of weirdly brittle strongman politics. The image of it is always so brittle and shaky, and just cracks up at the slightest bit of probing, right?

Rubin: And that’s why they have freaked out at the criticism over Natalie Harp. She is there to try to boost his ego, to keep him, I don’t know, on track, or to keep him from completely losing it. But now she looks like a nursemaid. She’s there to kind of soothe him and keep him going, pat him on the head, make sure he doesn’t lose control.

This is the complete devolution of a party that, as I say in the piece, has marinated in toxic masculinity for years. They have gone after trans kids. They’ve slammed Democrats for feminizing the country and for feminizing the military. But who sounds like a bunch of whiny little girls? And I want to apologize to whiny little girls, because they don’t sound this bad.

Sargent: Well, Pew had a new poll that we should talk about, because it sheds a lot of light on this. It finds Donald Trump’s approval rating now at 30 percent, which is the lowest of his second term.

Jen, I think we’re getting into the twenties maybe pretty soon here. What do you think?

Rubin: I think we’re getting into George Bush territory. Not only are his poll numbers low, but he is dragging down the entire party. This particular poll has the generic lead for Democrats at eight. We’ve seen other polls where it’s double digits. And even more frightful for Republicans is the enthusiasm gap.

That poll had some very frightful numbers about how strongly people in the two parties feel about getting out to vote, how important it is for their party to control the House. And once those numbers drop off and Republicans don’t show up, a whole slew of seats then come into play. If they don’t show up, they can’t win.

And that’s why the DCCC—that’s the group that elects Democratic House members—keeps expanding the map. That’s why independent analysts like Charlie Cook now have Kansas as a true toss-up in the Senate. The wheels come off the bus.

We talked about this a few weeks ago, Greg. The self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity, of doom and gloom, of embarrassment, that Donald Trump is hitting your party. And I think this Pew poll shows that in spades.

Sargent: So you brought up the enthusiasm numbers in the Pew poll. I’m just going to cite those. Pew finds that Democratic supporters are 14 points more likely than Republican supporters to say they’ve given the election a lot of thought. They’re seventeen points more likely to say they’re extremely motivated to vote this year.

These dynamics are all connected to one another. The Trump rallies going off the rails—I think that that’s really starting to get a lot of Republican voters to sort of say, you know what, man, I can’t do this anymore. This guy is too nuts.

Now, I think we should probably acknowledge that that door wouldn’t have been opened if he hadn’t fucked up the economy so badly with the tariffs and the war and everything else, and if he hadn’t screwed up everything so badly.

But that door is open now. Now that he’s screwed that all up, Republicans are now willing to take a bit of a harder look at Trump. I think that’s what’s happening here.

And I don’t want to overstate this. I don’t think the percentage of Republicans that are willing to look frankly at Trump is all that high. But there is a non-trivial number out there that are going to this place.

In fact, a recent Fox News poll found in Texas that non-MAGA Republicans actually disapprove of Trump now, and they are also demobilized. They’re not that enthusiastic about voting. So these are real dynamics, Jen.

Rubin: And you’re beginning to see coverage in the legacy media that Republicans don’t want to go out and knock on doors. Republicans don’t want to volunteer. We’re not talking about the mega-donors. We’re talking about ordinary people who make up the backbone of a party.

If you don’t have people who, a month before, want to listen to the news, let alone volunteer, you’re going to have some real trouble. And there are going to be people who look like they’re in safe seats now, because the numbers don’t look so dire. But if 5 percent, 7 percent more Republicans don’t show up, that’s going to sweep in a whole bunch more Democrats.

Sargent: It is. And just to wrap this up, your piece went very big picture on this by tying this to strongman politics as a general matter. As you pointed out, what we’re seeing here is kind of like a microcosm version of what you see with authoritarian movements—when the sort of facade of strength and power starts to crack, it really starts to fall apart rather quickly. Can you talk about those dynamics?

Rubin: Absolutely. You know, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who has looked at strongmen in her book about fascism, really makes the point that there’s a moment in which the wheels come off the bus, the lies don’t work, the mistakes become too apparent, and as a result you see this kind of crack-up.

Two things happen, and they’re both happening now. On one hand, the leader becomes unglued and starts saying a bunch of crazy shit. And the other thing is, they become much more aggressive, much more confrontational.

Now we hear that there are more people he wants to arrest. Cassidy Hutchinson is now on the potential list of indictees. He is coming after people because they are frustrated. There are reports that FBI agents are very upset because they, quote, want indictments. Indictments for what? Around what crimes?

So it is this frenzy of panic that has overtaken the Trump regime. On one hand, they become whiny, crybabies, desperate, saying all kinds of absolutely batshit, nutty stuff. But they also become much more aggressive, much more violent, much more prone to misuse law enforcement. So Democrats—and I know they are preparing—but they’d better be ready for election day, because we’re going to see, I am sure, all kinds of legal shenanigans. They’ve already begun.

Sargent: Absolutely, Jen Rubin. And I’ve got to say, you know, with a little luck, Fox News will get bullied by Donald Trump into covering his rallies a whole lot more, right?

Rubin: Please, please, twenty-four-seven. And you know what? He shouldn’t just go to Red America. This Democrat is pleading with him. Please go to some purple districts. Go to more states that are in play. Please let us all see him. The great leader needs to get out more where it matters.

Sargent: Exactly. Jen Rubin, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Rubin: It’s fun, Greg. Thanks so much.

If you doubt that President Donald Trump is successfully trashing the administrative state, consider a rule change that the Securities and Exchange Commission announced with little fanfare that took effect on October 2. Under the new rule, the SEC, which effectively until now has required a quorum of three to conduct business, will now require a quorum of only one.

At the moment, the SEC has two commissioners, both Republican. These are the Trump sycophant Paul Atkins, who serves as the SEC chairman, and the reliably pro-business Mark Uyeda, whom Trump appointed acting chairman before Atkins took office in April 2025. During Trump’s first term, Jim Chanos, a billionaire investment manager who predicted a year in advance the collapse of Enron, pronounced that America had entered “the golden age of fraud.” That was premature. In his second term, Trump is much more energetically pardoning financial fraudsters, and his SEC is more aggressively reducing transparency and slashing enforcement.

Even in the best of times, Republican administrations are much less keen than Democratic ones to enforce the nation’s securities laws. But Trump is taking moral laxity to stratospheric new levels. Perhaps Trump became more hospitable to white-collar felons after becoming one himself. Perhaps Trump is neutering the SEC so he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder whenever he trades stocks on insider information or uses his office to reward investors in his crypto business. Whatever the motive, going forward, our unitary executive will be able to indulge financial criminality more freely with a unitary SEC.

To help you understand how appalling this SEC rule change is, bear with me while I explain how the regulatory process works. You have Cabinet agencies like the Commerce Department or the Interior Department and you have independent agencies like the SEC, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board. Cabinet agencies are always headed by a single political appointee who answers to the president. Independent agencies are usually headed by a commission, or board, typically consisting of five Senate-confirmed commissioners (or board members). These commissioners serve staggered fixed terms, typically five years. When a sitting commissioner’s term ends, the president nominates a new one, but in doing so he must limit to a bare majority (typically three) the slots filled from his own party. For the remaining slots, he must nominate a person from the opposing party.

In practice, a president seldom must wait very long before an independent agency is controlled by a majority from his own party. An unfriendly Congress may resist confirming some commissioner or other on partisan grounds, but such standoffs are typically resolved when an additional commission slot opens for the opposite party. You want your guy? Then vote for my guy.

Trump, of course, famously lacks impulse control, and he doesn’t like waiting even a little bit to win a majority at any given independent agency. Consequently, he’s experimented with not nominating anybody to an independent agency if the next in line’s a Democrat, or, alternatively, firing sitting Democrats. Sometimes he’s done both. Firing a sitting commissioner without cause was, until this past June, illegal under the Supreme Court’s 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision, which said President Franklin Roosevelt lacked the power to fire, without cause, a seriously obnoxious Republican commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission named William E. Humphrey, before Humphrey’s term ended. Humphrey obligingly dropped dead while his case made its way through the courts, but Humphrey’s heirs continued it on the grounds that he was owed back pay, which the final decision granted them. (Hence “Executor.”)

Ninety-one years later, however, a unitary-executive-besotted Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that Trump was perfectly free to fire, without cause, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvara Bedoya, two Democratic appointees to the Federal Trade Commission, before their terms ended. By extension, Trump is now free to fire any commissioner of almost any independent agency simply for being a Democrat. Thus far (not counting Cook) Trump has fired at least 21 Democrats (five of them his own appointees!). Through either firings or refusing to nominate a replacement when a Democratic term expires, Trump has managed to deprive the SEC, the FTC, and the Commodities Future Trading Commission of a single Democratic member.

The CFTC, which has neither a statutory quorum requirement nor an internal rule defining a quorum, represents Trump’s beau idéal. It’s operated for nearly one year with a single commissioner, Michael Selig, an enthusiastic cheerleader for crypto, prediction markets, and sports betting. “The era of political lawfare, debanking and regulation by enforcement is over,” Trump’s solitary cop on the commodities beat said in August. “Innovators … are welcomed to the White House, not railroaded to the big house.” In the CFTC we see unitary executiveship at its most uninhibited. Even before Selig got there, CFTC enforcement actions in 2025 were down 80 percent compared to the previous decade, according to NPR’s Luke Garrett.

The only independent agency still insulated from Trump under Trump v. Slaughter is the Federal Reserve, where the commissioners are called governors. In a separate ruling issued the same day, Trump was barred from firing the Fed Governor Lisa Cook. The legal justification for letting Trump fire Slaughter, Bedoya, and 19 other Democrats but not Cook was, as I understand it, the following:

Because we say so.

Apart from some mumbo-jumbo about the Second Bank of the United States, the justices enunciated no distinction between the Fed and every other independent agency. This reactionary majority simply values the Fed—where political meddling could put its stock portfolios at risk—much more highly other regulatory agencies.

Trump v. Slaughter freed Trump to stop independent agencies in their tracks. But depriving them of a quorum turns out to be too clever by half, as I pointed out a month after Trump returned to office. That’s because Trump needs these agencies able to function so they can overturn regulations and rulings left behind by President Joe Biden.

A nice illustration came in June when Trump’s new best friend Jeff Bezos lost two Amazon cases before the National Labor Relations Board because Trump had denied the NLRB a quorum. In one case, an administrative law judge had to uphold a Biden precedent, and in the other case the NLRB actually possessed a quorum but followed a genteel board tradition not to overturn any precedent by fewer than three votes, which it didn’t have. Three months later, the NLRB had a quorum sufficient to reward Bezos and Amazon with three legal victories in two employee misclassification cases in which Amazon truly had no leg to stand on.

For Trump, the lesson should be: Play it straight! Nominate commissioners in timely fashion and you won’t have to wait long to get your working majority. Rush the process by firing commissioners, or by not nominating new ones, and you may deprive yourself of the quorum necessary to overturn Democratic precedents and do the business lobby’s bidding.

But the SEC’s new maneuver points to a third option: the one-person commission.

Even before the rule change, the SEC’s quorum requirement was, at least formally, fairly lax. Under a 1995 rule, three votes constituted a quorum if that agency had three or more commissioners. If it had two commissioners, or even one, then two or one could constitute a quorum on a sort of emergency basis. However, if the number of voting commissioners in a particular case was reduced by one or more recusals, then a minimum of two votes was still necessary to establish a quorum. This seemingly minor exception had the practical effect of imposing in nearly all instances a three-person quorum.

Let me explain. Recusals (that is, non-participation based on a conflict of interest) are extremely common at the SEC because so many commissioners come from the world of finance. In 2013, The Wall Street Journal estimated that more than half the SEC’s enforcement decisions required recusals from one or more commissioners. Given such a conflict-clogged environment, the SEC couldn’t until now easily tolerate many vacancies. The practical result was that the SEC almost never made a ruling with fewer than three commissioners—and if there was a single instance in which it ever made a ruling with only one commissioner I can’t find it.

John Reed Start, who was an SEC lawyer at the time the 1995 rule was implemented, wrote on LinkedIn that its provisional allowance for a quorum of two or one commissioners “was a stopgap, nothing more, and everyone assumed five commissioners would eventually be in place.” Indeed, according to Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times, with one exception (a six-month period in 2008) the SEC has never in its 92-year history operated without a member of the minority party.

In essence, the new SEC rule routinizes what was previously only a theoretical one-person quorum and renders unnecessary the appointment of any minority-party commissioners. The White House need no longer fret about the composition of the SEC. Trump can not only stop nominating pesky Democrats; he can stop pushing any SEC nomination through what Nate Silver predicts will be a Democratic Senate.

SEC Commissioner Uyeda’s term lasts through much of 2028, and if nobody is nominated to succeed him it can be extended through the rest of Trump’s presidency (and perhaps several months into the next). But if Uyeda’s term isn’t extended—or if Uyeda must recuse himself from this or that case—SEC Chair Atkins can act as Trump’s one-man quorum for the remainder of Trump’s presidency, because Atkins’ term doesn’t end until 2030. Granted, under Trump v. Slaughter any Democrat who succeeds Trump can (and probably will) fire Atkins promptly on January 20, 2029. But if a Republican succeeds Trump, Atkins could end up running the SEC as a one-man band for years.

You can’t pull this trick at every independent agency, because for some—the NLRB, for instance, or the Federal Communications Commission, or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission— the enabling statute specifies a three-person quorum. The 1934 statute that created the SEC, however, imposed no quorum requirement; the previous quorum requirement, dating to 1995, was simply a rule, and rules can be changed. Big rule changes require a period of public comment, so the SEC decided this was a little rule change that didn’t require public comment. But of course it isn’t a little change at all.

When the president commands a majority at an independent agency, that agency makes decisions in at least rough accordance with the president’s views. Why, then, should we care whether members of the opposite party are present to register dissent? Because, Senate Banking Committee Democrats wrote the White House in June, “a full slate of commissioners and board members can bring a range of perspectives to policies that shape our markets.”

This may strike a discordant note in the current political environment, but there’s practical value in being compelled to listen to the arguments of people who disagree with you. That’s why independent agencies were set up to include minority-party representation. When the president is as corrupt as Trump, the minority-party function extends to bearing witness. Thus Caroline Crenshaw, the last Democrat on Trump’s SEC—she left this past January—was able to alert the public the previous May that “we’re playing a game of regulatory Jenga…. The tower remains standing when you pull out a block or two here and there. But, how many blocks can you pull before the tower gives way?”

In a September 30 letter to the SEC, a shareholder activist named James McRitchie quoted several past and present SEC commissioners about the virtue of the SEC’s bipartisan structure. One of them, ironically, was Uyeda, who I presume must have voted in favor of the SEC’s new rule change (otherwise it would have deadlocked 1-1). Here’s what Uyeda said:

The Commission is structurally designed to promote regulation that is the product of consideration by five individuals with different perspectives. The underlying statute that created the Commission requires that the commissioners come from different political parties, with no more than three being from the same party. I view this arrangement as creating a basic bargain that the SEC will enjoy a degree of independence….

Amen. But what changed Uyeda’s mind after he spoke these words? The presence of a Republican in the White House. Uyeda delivered the above remarks in 2022, when Joe Biden was president and Uyeda was a lowly minority-party SEC commissioner. Now that Uyeda’s aligned with the White House and the SEC has gone almost a year without any minority-party commissioners, I suppose he’s come to appreciate the peace and quiet. But Uyeda will rediscover the virtues of “different perspectives” when Democrats retake the White House. When that happens, Democrats should honor independent-agency norms, restore space for the opposition, and above all abolish the one-person quorum.

While some stories provide imaginative escape, others are lessons or warnings, inviting us to dive into drama so we might return to our own lives with renewed purpose and impetus to act. Two of the most anticipated films of the fall, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, unfold urgent stories of our shared future, but ask what it means to tell them too late—too late to undo past wrongs, too late to change course, too late to do something with the lesson we might learn.

Digger begins with the eponymous Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an aging oil baron with a heavy drawl, caring for his cat, who is clearly dying though Digger won’t admit it. In the middle of this ordeal, he discovers that his drill site in Antarctica—which he has criminally mismanaged—is setting in motion a series of environmental cataclysms. The American president (John Goodman) and his Cabinet descend on Digger’s sprawling mansion to make a plan—not to save a single soul but, rather, to skew global opinion in their favor.

As Digger and President Compson stand and gaze out of a picture window, a tree falls over on its side. It would appear to be another instance of environmental collapse, except that, moments later, a giant human hand reaches out and rights it. Be prepared, for the remaining 90 or so minutes of the movie, to feel left out, to find that you are, by design, the last to know what is really going on.

The Social Reckoning, on the other hand, delivers pretty much what a news-literate Sorkin fan might expect. The sequel picks up over a decade after Sorkin’s The Social Network, in which Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook and looked bad doing it, and critiques Facebook as a global power and an international threat. Sorkin, the screenwriter for both, takes over the directorial reins here from David Fincher, and Zuckerberg is now played by Jeremy Strong. Jesse Eisenberg chose not to reprise the role, telling Variety that he didn’t “want to be associated with that character.” In the film as in life, it’s Zuckerberg’s company and its technology that have taken on a worrying momentum of their own, appearing ever more capable of AI-powered mass destruction. Can a single whistleblower force the hand of a trillion-dollar company and set in motion radical change?

Just as Sorkin favors principled stances, stylishly delivered, Iñárritu makes a meal of moral ambiguity, but both films revolve around bad men and a lot of monologuing.  

Both Digger and The Social Reckoning begin their stories of ego-fueled disaster at a point in the narrative when it is too late for any of the characters to stop it. They each approach the problem of too-late storytelling from their preferred modes. Sorkin turns in a trademark love letter to journalism, Iñárritu a satire of satire that moves between cerebral and bizarre. Just as Sorkin favors principled stances, stylishly delivered, Iñárritu makes a meal of moral ambiguity, but both films revolve around bad men and a lot of monologuing.  

Digger is the story of Digger Rockwell, but it is also a production of a play called Fossil Fools, centered on a character named “Digger Rockwell.” Most of the scenes in the film are in fact rehearsals for that play, and the others show us the drama behind the scenes. That is the film’s first twist, but it isn’t its last, and once revealed, it seems both obvious and impossible. Certainly, the viewer of a play would not witness the proceedings as we do, moving through the rooms of Digger’s mansion (antique, but still tacky), or experience a suspenseful pan from the person looking to what they are looking at. When the production is paused or halted, a network of elaborate, high-resolution screens are moved through space by faceless extras.

It is an unsettling trick, which only partly works. Generously, one might argue that the disorientation is intentional: The vast, inhuman scale of climate change is not just an environmental crisis but a representational one, as writers like Amitav Ghosh have explained. Iñárritu grapples with this in Fossil Fools, when the men in charge can only understand the size of the ice shelf that is racing toward Europe by comparing it to the size of American cities (Philadelphia, Boston). Digger dismisses out of hand the initial crack in the glacier, because it is only 30 times the size of his penis.

At its most lively, though, the play-within-the-play invites us to watch the actors hustle to their marks, scurry off in the darkness, shed their costumes with necessary speed. Goodman plays the most repulsive role in a universe full of stiff competition, a cancer-stricken president who believes himself to be the savior of the world but would be hard-pressed to name his favorite Bible verse. Riz Ahmed turns in the most moving performance as scientist Dr. Nirav Ganesh, executing hairpin turns from broad humor to quiet agony; his curtain-call robot dance is also quite good.

Then there’s Cruise, who is tasked with holding together the film’s two plots, and whose star presence is never absent. The indestructible Tom Cruise has been saving the world for decades, most recently defeating an AI antagonist in Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning. As Digger, he throws back to his roles as a greasy motivational speaker in Magnolia or a foul-mouthed Hollywood executive in Tropic Thunder; they might not have the power to end the world, but they are sure going to make things worse before they go.

But when we see Cruise playing “Curtis Markson,” the actor who plays Digger in the play, we also get a brief look at Cruise as the meticulous, perfectionist, demanding creative who has notes for everyone, even the makeup artist. Of course, it’s a look at, never into, the star himself; it only draws on those elements that the Cruise team would approve (not the other stuff). Over and over, Digger teases us with the prospect of something real, only to offer more stagecraft.

Over and over, Digger teases us with the prospect of something real, only to offer more stagecraft.

If this sounds like a punishing two hours at the cinema, it’s because the movie probably thinks you deserve it. The play presents the offices of the European Commission as a sterile white set, full of angry extras whom Digger bluntly confronts. You “bask in the comfort of your unsustainable life,” he tells them, adding, “You demand, and I supply!” The figure of Digger is decidedly an antihero, but the mob is fairly repellent too. The European Commission scene feels like a demented Frank Capra fantasy in which Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith goes to Washington in order to drill, baby, drill. No wonder Markson doesn’t know what this play is saying.

“It’s funny and it’s stupid and it’s scary and it makes no goddamn sense!” crows the show’s creepy, red-headed producer (Jesse Plemons). Some of that is true, at least. It is also hostile, clever, too clever, abstract, chilly, angry, and bored. All of this would be forgivable, even impressive, if it was also exciting.

With its layered storytelling and the connections between the play and the mysteriously shrouded present, their present and our own, Digger is more than it seems. It is possible that, like Fossil Fools, it will even stand the test of time. But if annihilation is around the corner, as this film persuasively imagines, you might not want to spend your precious remaining hours watching Tom Cruise use his pinky nail to feed tuna to an animatronic cat.

Where Digger has its ice shelf, the 2010 film The Social Network had a person, and that person was Mark Zuckerberg. When the Winklevoss twins visit Harvard president Larry Summers to explain that Zuckerberg has stolen their idea for a social networking platform, Summers is dismissive and snide. When they suggest this idea could be worth millions, he replies, “You might be letting your imagination run away with you.” 

No one sees Zuckerberg coming, because no one has the imagination or the hunger of this prickly dweeb from Westchester County, and Sorkin cannot help but throw some begrudging admiration his way. “You’re not an asshole, Mark,” says one of Zuckerberg’s young attorneys. “You’re just trying so hard to be.”

Eisenberg’s squinting, surly adolescent has aged into a bopping, smirking twerp who cannot find a necktie to suit his sallow complexion. (His poor, poor professional dresser.) In The Social Reckoning, Strong, an unrepentant Method performer, captures Zuckerberg’s smugness and impatience, though the film is not interested in some of his specific quirks (the aborted political run, the mixed martial arts hobby). Throughout the film we see him prepare to testify before Congress, with the help of a professional crisis manager (Wunmi Mosaku) and associate turned public detractor, Charlie (Bill Burr), who has been improbably called on to serve as a resource. Charlie and Mark argue at length about whether it is Facebook’s job to police deliberate misinformation. “Harm, I promise you, is fucking imminent,” Charlie warns.

With all its focus on preparation, The Social Reckoning, like Digger, is consumed with the act of rehearsal. The fact that the characters are simply honing their performances infuses their words and actions with an air of unreality: Whether they’re discussing climate apocalypse or right-wing indoctrination, there’s a sense that this is all practice and that the real dangers are happening somewhere off-screen. Characters hide behind their scripts: Zuckerberg flatly repeats that Facebook is the public square, Facebook is a corkboard, even as he skews the Facebook algorithm toward “meaningful social interaction,” an internal euphemism for “outrage bait.” Users, fed toxic slop, rehearse increasingly extremist political or self-harming beliefs until, finally, they are radicalized or broken.

No longer the surly, squinting teen to whom we had private access, Zuckerberg has grown into an impenetrable billionaire and a public figure, so he is no longer required to make sense. And, like Digger and the powerful men who surround him, Zuckerberg’s sense of scale is warped by greed and the dick-measuring contests of Silicon Valley. When he is presented with the option to put in safeguards to avoid inflammatory, dangerous speech, the only downside being a 1 percent reduction in users, he snaps, “Do you know what one percent is at scale?”

Zuckerberg has ceased to be the smartest guy in the room, and so Sorkin redirects his attention to journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison). Political reporter Horwitz moves to The Wall Street Journal’s Bay Area office to cover the Facebook beat, despite his knowing nothing about social media or technology. (His boss, played by Betty Gilpin, is a foul-mouthed, His Girl Friday–style delight.) Coming home from a bad date with a Facebook bro, Frances sees Jeff’s message on her LinkedIn and impulsively responds.

She has become concerned about the dangers that Facebook poses to teen mental health, and about the ways the algorithm had been redesigned to direct users toward extremist hate groups. For a long time, she has been trying to convey her troubling findings to other members of the Civic Integrity committee; all she has received in return is the nickname “Cassandra,” a reference to the woman in Greek mythology cursed with visions of the future and never be believed when she shares them.

Haugen and Horwitz have their own mantras to rehearse, drums to beat; Haugen in particular. “You and I aren’t on the same team,” Haugen recites, ad nauseam; she believes in the “mission” of Facebook. Haugen is a squarely adorable Sorkinian invention, a blunt and scowling heroine game to do Anora cosplay when she wants to go incognito in public. (On one trip to his hotel, she dresses up in a black bustier.) Meanwhile, Horwitz asks his source the right questions and waits patiently, blue eyes wide and warm, as she ties herself in knots. She mocks his love of old movies and calls his banana daiquiris “a dumb drink”; he teases her, approvingly, for being “mean. Like, scary mean.” It plays more like a 1990s romantic comedy than a corporate thriller.

Digger is ostensibly about a play but works like a movie, while The Social Reckoning is a journalism movie that feels like a play, and a didactic one at that.

This fictionalized near-miss love story is there because the audience needs something to look at during the film’s lengthy scenes of exposition. When the two aren’t flirting, they are explaining journalistic ethics and Tech 101 to one another, and, more importantly, to us. The bulk of the film’s run time is dedicated to these conversations, sometimes enlightening but mostly rudimentary rundowns of how social media works. These only underscore who this film is for: social media luddites, middlebrow legacy media fanatics, and Facebook obsessives who, in Horwitz’s words, don’t even realize the drink has been spiked.

The Social Reckoning lacks the cinematic dynamism of The Social Network or even of Digger, which, for all its shortcomings, is wildly visually inventive. Digger is ostensibly about a play but works like a movie, while The Social Reckoning is a journalism movie that feels like a play, and a didactic one at that. The most compelling sequence comes when the action cuts between two threads: Haugen, having quit her job, snaps pictures of sensitive internal documents before she loses access to the Facebook server; Zuckerberg is panic-stricken on January 6 as Trump supporters storm the Capitol, and staffers in his war room beg him to lock Trump out of his account.

Are these moments meant to be happening at the same time? Or is it more of a thematic montage, placing the patriotism of a whistleblower next to the horrors of bloodied flags and Zuckerberg’s infuriating facial expressions? I’m not sure precisely what Sorkin means here, but at least the movie is showing us something instead of just telling.

The Social Reckoning ends on a muddled hopefulness, with Haugen testifying before Congress—unlike Zuckerberg, she is seemingly unrehearsed, frank, drawing on just a few cute notecards. The closing title cards detail Facebook/Meta’s recent $17 billion settlement with 47 states, alongside the company’s renewed commitment to zero fact checking. It also refers to the enormous influence Facebook once exercised over the circulation and consumption of news, citing a 2018 Pew Research Center study finding that 43 percent of adults read about current events on the site. The music is triumphant, as is Haugen’s proud, abashed expression. The good guys’ victory is far from secured, but, as Horwitz says earlier of a basketball game on television, “the game’s not over.” 

We must continue to mistrust and talk over those who would tell us, in Digger’s parlance, that “compliance is freedom.” Better, as the 2023 nuclear dramedy Asteroid City urged, to “keep telling the story.” For Iñárritu, storytelling is a vehicle for catharsis and distraction and not much else. The Social Reckoning, with all its cuteness and misplaced pomp, isn’t ready to roll over and play dead. It may be too late to reverse years of tech-induced harms, but there is still time to unfriend a few billionaires.

In Maine, as everywhere else in the country, one of this year’s biggest electoral issues is the cost of energy. The price of electricity is rising at the third-highest rate in the nation, and heating oil—which Maine relies on more than any other state—now costs a record $6. So it’s no surprise that the state’s candidates for governor were asked about this issue in a debate last week. But Democrats should take note of how their nominee responded.

Hannah Pingree, a former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, rightly attributed these rising costs in part to the global energy crisis caused by President Trump’s war against Iran. “We need to end the war,” she said. “That might bring relief.” She also called on the state and federal government to provide more funds, especially to help low-income families. The usual solutions. But then she went one step further.

“I do believe deeply in weatherization and efficiency programs,” she said. Pingree formerly co-chaired the Maine Climate Council, an advisory group that created the state’s ambitious climate plan, and she noted that she helped create Maine’s quasi-state energy-efficiency agency, which Republican nominee Bobby Charles “wants to get rid of.” She added, “I believe investing in efficiency, continuing to install heat pumps, which help people get off foreign oil ... will long term save us money and make us more energy independent.”

The magic words here, believe it or not, are “heat pumps,” which Mainers have adopted at a rapid clip thanks in part to Pingree’s championing. And notably, in her answer, she did not utter two other words that have bedeviled the Democrats: climate change.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, a debate has roiled the Democratic Party about “climate hushing”—the accusation that politicians are deliberately not talking about climate change. This is a real phenomenon, and it’s driven by the belief, sowed in part by the consultant class, that the subject alienates voters. But as the Maine race shows, “climate change” is on midterm ballots all over the country—even if those exact words aren’t being spoken—because of its connection to voters’ wallets.

Rising gas and electricity prices are top of mind for many voters—second only to the affordability of health care, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll published Tuesday. That’s a huge problem for the Republicans, not merely because they’ve been in power amid the price spike but because their president is directly responsible for it. In addition to Trump’s war with Iran, his war on climate policy has put extra pressure on the global oil supply by taking so many alternatives off the table. Energy Innovation, a California think tank, released data last week showing that policy changes since he took office—like cancelling wind, solar, and other clean energy projects—would raise household energy costs by thousands of dollars through 2040.

Trump is also perhaps the country’s most prominent supporter of one the biggest villains in this year’s elections: data centers, which are rapidly proliferating across the country to support the AI boom—and consequently increasing communities’ electricity bills. These energy-hogging monstrosities, many of which are powered by natural gas, also befoul the local environment and, yes, contribute to climate change. Voters in Maine, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona, and beyond might not be opposing them for that reason—or at least not only for that reason—but there’s no doubting the net benefit to the planet of that opposition.

Welcome to the new political landscape, in which “climate” and “cost of living” are no longer politically incompatible priorities—rather, a productively messy coupling. As utility bills rise, the cost at the pump gets prohibitive, and rural America is invaded by data centers, it’s clear that environmental and economic issues are so intertwined that it no longer makes sense to talk about them as separate “issues.”

The shift counters conventional wisdom: Political consultants and pundits have in recent years warned that climate was divisive and that Democrats should instead stick to “affordability.” David Schor, an influential pollster, said in 2021, “when you talk about climate change, you sound like a weird, very liberal white person.” Democrats weren’t talking that much about climate change anyway, but largely heeded this advice, even when making climate-forward policy. President Biden hardly bragged about his considerable investments in renewable energy, the whole package of which was branded as the “Inflation Reduction Act” to advertise (somewhat misleadingly) an economic impact.

Trump’s 2024 victory only made matters worse, apparently convincing even more elected Democrats that talking about climate change is at best ineffective, and at worst damaging. The warnings from consultants and pundits intensified. The Searchlight Institute, run by Adam Jentleson, Senator John Fetterman’s former chief of staff, released a report a year ago titled “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change.” That rule is, “Don’t Say Climate Change,” because while “battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them.” Socialist geographer Matt Huber, writing in The New York Times in May, suggested that Democrats emulate candidates who avoid the subject to win back the working class: “The kinds of policies they support — for example, public investments in infrastructure like housing and electricity — will help address climate change, but there is little reason for politicians like them to focus on the issue anymore.”

Many Democratic candidates, even some insurgents on the left, are finding their own path through this thicket. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has gone on Fox News and flatly stated, “I’m not going to defend the Green New Deal.” But he has called for a moratorium on data centers, not just to protect ratepayers, but the environment, too. “Keep the data centers away from our Great Lakes,” he said recently. He’s perhaps avoiding “climate change” as a political issue, but he’s showing how we can’t silo the wellbeing of “nature” from our own. It’s all connected.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is perhaps the foremost example of a Democrat who’s threading this needle. He ran on an affordability platform last year before it became a buzzword among Democrats, and he doesn’t talk much about “climate” or the “environment”—but he has been working to expand bike lanes and make buses free, which will save New Yorkers money and reduce car emissions. The socialist mayor has a 60 percent approval rating, more popular by far than any other New York politician.

It’s hard to argue with success. Still, drawing the connection between climate and affordability more explicitly—as some, but too few Democrats are doing—will help build an even bigger constituency for the policies that address both problems, and will sharpen the Democrats’ line of attack on the Republicans. And there are ample other opportunities to make these kinds of connections on the campaign trail. For instance, a new study by Food and Water Watch found that over the past decade household water costs have increased by 62 percent. Privatization, federal disinvestment in water systems, and climate change are all factors, the group said. The biggest increase—a staggering 177 percent—was in New Hampshire; take note, 2028 presidential primary hopefuls.

Climate change is not a toxic subject for voters. It’s just not a top priority: A recent Environmental Voter Project poll of likely voters in eight Senate battleground states found that just 23 percent of Democrats and 19 percent of independents consider “climate change and pollution” to be a top-three issue. However, the same poll also found that voters are more likely to support candidates who want to transition away from fossil fuels, and that “they wanted politicians to spend more time talking about climate change and pollution (59%), rather than less (17%).” In other words, voters themselves are coming out against climate hushing.

This year Gavin Newsom has shown that he would be a billionaire-friendly president. Which means he shouldn’t be president at all. In short order, we will all have a huge field of Democratic presidential hopefuls to keep up with, but Newsom has done us a favor and disqualified himself before he even formally launches his expected campaign.

Newsom has aligned himself with the uberwealthy on two major fronts. He has strongly opposed a ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of California billionaires. The measure would almost certainly pass if it had vocal backing from Democratic politicians in the state. But lacking that support, polls suggest it might fail. In addition, Newsom pushed Attorney General Rob Bonta and other Democratic attorneys to cut a deal with David Ellison (son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison) and his company Skydance, instead of continuing litigation to stop or stall Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Newsom’s public wariness about the attorney generals taking a tough line against the merger inspired other California Democratic politicians to adopt the same stance, undercutting the leverage of Bonta and his colleagues. The attorney generals ended up dropping their opposition to the merger after a few minor concessions from Ellison and his firm.

Newsom has cast these moves as being in the interests of his state’s residents. After all, Ellison threatened to move Paramount’s headquarters away from California unless Bonta and the other attorneys general blessed the merger, potentially costing thousands of Californians their jobs. (Ellison’s Skydance acquired Paramount last year.) Newsom and other critics of the billionaire tax say it would raise money initially but ultimately would rob California of revenue, as the superrich leave the state en masse.

In reality, the economic case for the governor’s stances isn’t clear-cut. Sure, Ellison isn’t moving Paramount’s headquarters from California for now, but I would expect the company’s workforce in the Bay State to be drastically reduced in the next few years. That’s what companies that merge do—claim redundancies and lay off thousands of people. Ellison has already written a memo to employees of the newly merged company hinting at significant job cuts to come.

Also, we should consider the economic effects for Californians (and other Americans) who aren’t employees at Paramount’s headquarters. Will the costs and options for people who watch movies, streaming television, and other products offered by Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery get better or worse now that a rival company has been removed from the market? I predict worse. Will actors, television writers, and others in the entertainment industry get more or fewer opportunities with one less competitor for their services? I would bet on fewer.

In terms of the billionaires’ tax, I have no doubt some billionaires would move. But there have been numerous studies of the effects of increased taxes on superrich individuals. They often don’t back up their threats to move. Their homes, families, country clubs, and other cherished possessions are still in the place where they made their money. California has great weather and is the center of numerous industries. All the billionaires there aren’t going to flee.

And the specifics in California make the case for the proposed wealth tax even stronger. California billionaires pay a tax rate of about 0.2 percent on their wealth each year, according to an analysis from economists Jasper Boll, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. That’s significantly less than the proposed tax. “Even if one fourth of all billionaires left, it would take 100 years for the income tax loss to match the revenue from the wealth tax. In the extreme case where all billionaires left, it would take 25 years for the income tax loss to match the revenue from the tax,” the economists say.

But while the economics here are at least a bit complicated, the democratic implications are not. They are simply terrible. Ellison put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she has both shifted the network decidedly to the right and forced out many of the company’s top journalists after they wouldn’t abide by her Trump-friendly direction for the network. By acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, Ellison now controls CNN, perhaps an even more important news institution in today’s America than CBS. Ellison is letting current CNN editor in chief and chairman Mark Thompson remain in his post, instead of bringing in Weiss or one of her allies to run the network. But that shouldn’t reassure anyone. Thompson and everyone else at CNN have seen how Weiss has run CBS with Ellison’s blessing. They have to assume his journalism vision is pro-Israel, anti-anti-Trump, and pro-billionaire. CNN employees are likely to self-censor to avoid drawing Ellison’s ire.

Yes, I know that fewer Americans watch television news than ever. But outlets like CNN and CBS still matter, because they have reputations and brands that carry a lot of weight, as well as large, experienced staffs whose coverage influences what shows up on social media. What stories about the antidemocratic tendencies of Trump and the Republicans won’t be covered by CNN because of Ellison’s leadership? (Remember that Weiss initially blocked a 60 Minutes report on the horrible conditions in a prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent immigrants from Venezuela.) What negative stories about Trump will be whitewashed? How negatively will Democrats skeptical of Israel be covered? (In Ellison’s defense, CNN anchors Dana Bash and Jake Tapper in particular are already quite hostile to critics of Israel and don’t need their new boss to push them there.)

It is shocking and incredibly stupid that one of the most prominent politicians in a pro-democracy party has helped allies of an authoritarian acquire a major news outlet. Has Newsom not studied how autocrats across the world censor critical content by ensuring media is owned by people friendly to them? Has he not seen how Ellison and Weiss have led CBS?

And it’s not just CNN. HBO, TNT, and numerous media properties are part of Warner Bros. Discovery and therefore now Ellison’s empire. The movie Sinners was distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures; John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight airs on HBO. A wide array of anti-racist, progressive, pro-democracy content and personnel is now under the thumb of Ellison. I predict that Ellison and his team will either block some of that content or force it to be more pro-Trump, or at least less anti-Trump. Has Newsom not considered this, or does he consider his (likely misplaced) hopes of saving a few thousand California jobs more important?

The billionaire tax doesn’t just raise revenue. It’s a way to both underscore the prodigious, excessive wealth of billionaires in the United States today and limit their ability to use their wealth to influence politics. One of the main reasons our democracy is eroding is the alliance between right-wing politicians and billionaires like Elon Musk. And there is finally a grassroots movement to confront the oligarchy, best illustrated by the nationwide, bipartisan resistance to AI data centers. This ballot initiative being defeated in California, one of the most liberal states in the country, would be a huge blow to that movement.

That’s why it’s so galling and, again, stupid for Newsom, one of the most prominent Democrats in the country, to be joining the effort to kill the wealth tax.

Why is Newsom doing the billionaires’ work for them? The main reason is probably ideology. He’s a typical California establishment Democrat. Such Democrats, including Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi, tend to be generically “liberal” and supportive of gay rights and abortion rights. But they often aren’t progressive on economic issues, especially when it comes to challenging corporate power and the wealthy.

Secondly, there’s 2028. Many of the superrich don’t like the current Republican Party but are also wary of progressive Democrats and greater regulations on corporations. They would love a Democratic Party led by a billionaire-friendly figure and might pump in tens of millions of dollars to boost such a candidate during the primary. If Newsom is auditioning for anti-MAGA millionaires and billionaires, his moves this year help him.

So, either Newsom doesn’t appreciate the danger of billionaires and mega companies, or does understand it but is ignoring all of that to help his presidential campaign. I’m not sure which explanation for his moves is the correct one. I also don’t care. Either way, Newsom has shown, even before he officially declares his presidential candidacy, that he isn’t the right person to lead the Democratic Party. Maybe that was already obvious. Remember that Newsom’s first major move after Trump won a second term was to yuck it up with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon on the governor’s podcast. Newsom has bad political instincts, and as his pro-billionaire moves show, he’s terrible on policy too. Democrats who were considering him as a 2028 candidate should have one word for the California governor: Next!

Donald Trump rages regularly at Fox News. But Axios now reports that there’s more behind this than meets the eye: White House and GOP operatives have privately pressured Fox for months to change how it’s covering Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. The problem? By giving El-Sayed airtime and covering him in a somewhat factual way, it’s made it harder for Trump and the GOP to smear him as a crazy radical jihadist. Translation: Don’t let voters learn the truth about this guy; it’ll make it harder for us to beat him! That is so deeply humiliating. But it also gets at a bigger story about how the manly men of MAGA get so whiny when the electoral going gets tough. We talked to Jennifer Rubin, editor-in-chief of The Contrarian. We discuss her new piece on the flimsiness of MAGA machismo, probe the deeper reasons Trump can’t allow the truth about El-Sayed to be told, and dissect a new Pew poll showing Trump’s approval down to an abysmal 30 percent. Listen to this episode here.

Either Donald Trump is playing dumb with the American people, or there actually is something wrong with him.

The president turned to Truth Social Thursday to dispel fears surrounding his recent taunts to Iran, insisting via a social media post that he had not invited “the enemy to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles.”

But he did. Three times.

Trump first told the world that Iran should bomb the two major Californian metropoles during a midterm campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday.

“I want to see a tremendous victory,” Trump said then. “You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.”

“They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego,” Trump continued as the packed-out arena cheered. “That’s—this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.… But it’s going to end very soon. And it’ll end one way or the other. And your gas and your gasoline and all of the things.”

Trump repeated the threat on Wednesday in Texas, where he told another fawning MAGA crowd: “I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles.”

For whatever reason, while speaking with reporters that same night, Trump felt compelled to solicit a foreign adversary to attack America for a third time.

“I say it all the time, let’s see what would happen if Iran ever did anything to Los Angeles or San Diego. I’m talking about through missiles. You want to see problems, let them hit Los Angeles or San Diego,” Trump said.

But writing on his social media platform hours later, Trump claimed that reports of his own words were the result of “fake and artificial news” and that the comments were made in relation to the “temporary increase in the price of Gasoline,” which he suggested online was “a small price to pay for Iran not having a Nuclear Weapon.”

“And, if you want to see a big price, can you imagine what it would be like if they bombed San Diego and/or Los Angeles? All I was doing was making a comparison between paying a little more, for a short time, for Gasoline, versus the bombing of our Major Cities,” Trump wrote, adding that “everybody knew that.”

If Trump actually did mean to discuss the country’s current military efforts and its corresponding (and unfortunate) toll on oil and gas prices, then his attempts to do so were so bizarre and confounding that their sole communicative success was in denigrating the office of the president.