The New Republic

Embattled Senator John Fetterman was the only Democrat to vote against a resolution that would require the State Department to report when Americans are murdered by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The Tuesday night motion failed 47-53, with Senator Rand Paul being the only Republican to join the rest of the Democrats.

This is a low point, even for someone as rabidly and irrationally pro-Israel as Fetterman. The resolution, introduced by Senators Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine, and Bernie Sanders, would have been largely symbolic—requiring a State Department report to Congress on fatal settler violence against American citizens in the West Bank within 30 days of their murders, nothing more. The State Department failing to deliver said report would only trigger a stoppage of some aid to Israel, an issue that Fetterman lives and dies by. The resolution also included reports on the status and conditions of Palestinian-American children from the West Bank who are currently in IDF custody. But thanks to Fetterman and the GOP, Congress won’t even get access to that basic and vital information.

“Tonight, 47 Senators supported my resolution to get accountability for the 9 Americans killed on the West Bank & for Palestinians who face injustices daily. That’s more support than we’ve ever had in this fight,” Van Hollen wrote Tuesday night on X. “Republicans blocked us, but we won’t stop until we get justice.”

Nine American citizens have been killed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank since 2022, with little to no justice from either the U.S. or Israeli government. Palestinian-American journalist and Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh and 20-year-old Palestinian-American and Florida resident Sayfollah Kamel Musallet are perhaps the most notable of the nine deaths. The resolution does not account for the at least 1,000 Palestinians without American citizenship who have been killed in violent pogroms by Israeli settlers in the West Bank since October 7.

President Trump’s accord on “superintelligence” signed with tech leaders in the White House Tuesday contains a glaring error—“United States” is misspelled.

The accord lays out criteria for regulation and safeguards for different artificial intelligence technologies, and was signed by five technology company CEOs along with the president. But under the president’s signature, the text reads “President of the Unites States.”

The accord is part of an executive order signed by Trump replacing the use of the phrase “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence,” reaffirming what Trump said in his U.N. General Assembly speech.

“[W]elcome to the new world of super intelligence—S.I. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better, it is much better, and it’s much more accurate,” Trump said last week. “Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re gonna find out pretty soon.”

Every day, the American public is more and more opposed to the corporate misuse of AI and the proliferation of data centers. Attempting to rebrand AI already opens the president—and the U.S.—up to ridicule. Misspelling “United States” only increases that ridicule. One wonders if a White House aide or staffer used AI to draft the document.

In a leaked audio recording, Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton privately admitted that President Donald Trump’s disastrous midterm convention in Dallas hurt Republican candidates.

At a private fundraiser in Washington last Thursday, Paxton spoke candidly about the event, according to a recording shared with The New York Times. 

In the recording, Paxton is asked: “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” It is not immediately clear to whom the speaker is referring.

“So to be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good,” Paxton said.

Three other people confirmed Paxton’s attendance at the fundraiser to the Times. Two recalled that Paxton was asked this question, and one recalled his negative response. The person who recorded the audio opposes Paxton’s Senate campaign. 

Paxton’s comments are obviously a humiliating gaffe for Trump, who backed the attorney general against Senator John Cornyn in a shocking political maneuver. 

The Republican midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month was key to Trump’s plan to energize his base—but polls have shown that Democrats benefited far more than Republicans did. RealClearPolitics’s Generic Congressional Vote, which averages results of other major polls, showed a sharp rise in support for Democrats after the convention, while Republicans’ support stayed about the same. 

Paxton has long struggled to match Democratic candidate James Talarico’s funding. According to their latest quarterly filings with the Federal Election Commission, Talarico’s campaign had raked in $31.6 million, while Paxton had only raised $9.3 million. 

Trump has repeatedly pledged his desire to see Paxton elected but hesitated to commit any part of his $400 million MAGA Inc. war chest to help him win. Earlier this month, Trump held a fundraiser in Houston that was touted as a lifeline for Paxton’s campaign—but the money actually went to the Republican National Convention, according to the Wall Street Journal.  

The president’s super PAC eventually gave $10 million to fund two advertisements for Paxton’s campaign. Meanwhile, Republican donors have been skittish about contributing to Paxton’s campaign amid mounting scandals. 

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 30 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.

This week, Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada escalated, as an import ban on some Canadian products went into effect. Trump has been raging at Canada for months, but he just said almost in passing that the U.S. gets along with China better than it gets along with Canada. And we think it shouldn’t pass unnoticed how casually Trump just tosses away a major longtime ally.

Trump also unleashed his trade advisor to make truly vicious and sneering comments about Canada, to boot. Meanwhile, Republicans themselves are admitting that the trade war with Canada is a big problem for them in the midterms, and getting worse.

So we’re talking about all of it with New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing well about the economic roots of Trump-GOP midterm woes. Virginia, always great to have you on.

Virginia Heffernan: So good to see you, Greg.

Sargent: So a quick recap. Last month Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian imports, and Canada hit back with retaliatory tariffs. Now Trump just banned several other imports—dairy, motorcycles, alcohol. The Times calls this a vicious trade war and says much of our relationship with Canada has unraveled.

Virginia, I’m not a trade expert, but I know enough to understand that Trump completely pulled this whole thing out of his ass to assuage his feelings of impotence and failure. Your thoughts about that?

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, we’ve come to the part in the Trump proceedings where, to quote South Park, we blame Canada. And when that song—I was just looking it up—came out in 1999, it was considered a punchline, because it would be so outlandish for Americans, however arrogant and absurd we were in the nineties, to blame our trading partner and close ally to the north, who are famous for their mild-manneredness, to blame them really for anything. But here we are.

And this is not playing well with Americans who already are beginning to hold Trump in not just disapproval, but outright contempt. You may have seen that he’s gotten under 30 percent. So one poll showed him at 29 percent. Nate Silver, it seems not long ago, said there was a floor of 40. Now we’ve crashed through, potentially, the floor of 30, which is just amazing.

And it’s what you hear from what I’ve been thinking of as the diesel class. This particular demographic that I just wrote about, who know their way around that big nozzle at the gas station, the lower-down one. They’re truck drivers, they drive the Ford F-class or the Silverado. This thing that diesel is skyrocketing faster than gas.

I mean, when you go to the pump, you see the normal gas prices, and then at the bottom, usually an eye-popping number now for diesel. It’s broken through all records. It’s doubled since Biden was in office. And that group immediately puts the blame on Trump. They put the blame on the trade war with Canada, and they especially put the blame on his war with Iran.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. There is a certain class of voter out there who’s quite MAGA-adjacent, who understands on a really instinctual level that trade with Canada is good for our country. And these are voters who are concentrated in places like the Midwest and in Maine, and a lot of places where these Senate races are playing out.

Heffernan: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, when we’ve been doing import and export with Canada, because we are connected by land—who do you think are driving over that border, from Maine, from the states that are adjacent to it, from the Great Lakes states? They are these long-haul truckers that Trump has made a big effort to court.

And they are used to passing through that Canadian border, and they want more trade with Canada. They have relatives in Canada. This is kind of more than an ally. It’s a familial relationship that we don’t have with Europe.

Sargent: Right. And Trump just has contempt for the people who we rely on. So let’s listen to Trump talk about Canada this week. Here he’s asked whether a trade deal with Canada is still possible. Check this out.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, they want to have a deal with us. They call us all the time. The problem is that they’ve treated the United States very unfairly. They have been one of the worst countries in the entire world. You know, we get along with China, and we make good deals, but Canada’s been really very difficult to deal with, actually. And they feel entitled and, you know, they’re not a state. There’s nothing they have that we need. We have more energy than they have. We have all the lumber you could possibly use. We have everything. We don’t need.

Sargent: Virginia, let’s break this up into two pieces. First, note how casually he slips in the idea that we get along with China, suggesting it’s better than with Canada. I mean, I know he’s trying to own the libs, but he really did own me there. I’m sure he owned you as well. I mean, I don’t feel like that should pass by unremarked on, do you? It’s really disgusting conduct from the president.

Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, it’s own the libs, but it’s also owning everyone who is committed to the idea that democracy and free trade move together—which is a kind of fundamental part of the long peace, that we need these relationships. I mean, we’ve said it many times, but the postwar order is sort of, in America, lying in fragments. It makes no sense.

Sargent:And the remark about Canada feeling entitled—that’s not how trade works. Trade is mutually beneficial.

And the crack about them not being a state—is the idea supposed to be that we’d be treating Canada better if we absorbed it into the United States against the will of Canadians through violent conquest? What’s he talking about?

Heffernan: I don’t know if you saw Mark Carney and Emmanuel Macron, you know, make their romance Instagram official a few days ago—maybe nine or ten days ago. But they were talking about stuff like shutting Trump out of crude oil imports from Canada. They were also talking about their mutual interests in democracy and the rule of law.

And it’s clear who is not interested in democracy and the rule of law—the elephant in the room, who they are intending to rout with this new romance between the EU and Canada.

Sargent: Yeah, it does seem like this is a big component in the world just kind of moving on without Trump’s America, and just sort of shrugging and saying, well, I guess it’s over, Trump’s destroyed the place, so see you later.

And here’s where it gets really ugly. White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, who’s a big architect of this catastrophe, this week warned Canada not to interfere in our elections—which I guess is supposed to mean that Canada isn’t allowed to retaliate against our hostile trade acts. And then at an event in Washington, Navarro also sneered at potential Canadians in the audience, saying this: “Please, if you’re on K Street, get the hell out of our country.”

Virginia, this is like the perfect example of how Trump world and MAGA’s malicious nationalism works. Abusing Canada and Canadians is supposed to thrill MAGA in some way, but as you point out, it’s a total misread of where a big chunk of ordinary rank-and-file Republican voters, and even some MAGA voters, really are.

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, you may remember the Canadian trucker—we’re now back to the pandemic era—but the Canadian trucker, what was it, some kind of caravan, that were anti-mask, they didn’t want to get tested before they went over the American border. They were MAGA-adjacent, they were MAGA-supportive.

I mean, we saw at least the Canadian diesel class was very much on the right, and very much—you know, Trump was very excited about them then. And now he is not.

Sargent: It’s not just MAGA, it’s also swing voters who are going to be deeply alienated by this stuff. The Los Angeles Times had a really good report on this, in fact. They talked to a bunch of Republicans and found that Republicans think it’s a real problem.

One former chair of the Michigan Republican Party said, “it doesn’t make things easier. It’s not helping.” A Maine Republican media strategist said that the trade war with Canada puts, “another log on the fire of the affordability issue.”

And here’s a real telling one that I think will get you going with your diesel class stuff. There was a focus group held of Michigan swing voters in early September, and eleven of the 13 participants said the trade war was bad for the state, bad for the state of Michigan. One Michigan swing voter said this: “The more we put tariffs on stuff, the more they put tariffs on stuff. Prices are just ultimately going to go up for all of us.”

So swing voters are seeing that Trump’s zero-sum economics is a dead end, and that trade is positive-sum and good for everybody. And I think that’s good.

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, there’s no history of Americans in, like, the industrial Midwest worried about jobs going to Canada. This is not—right? It’s not like in the NAFTA days, he had locked in on that jobs were going to Mexico, right? Before we sort of realized that the danger was more from automation and maybe China. But there is no history of making Canada a kind of bugbear that is either stealing from us or whatever.

Even in the early days where he was so critical of NATO for not paying their dues—you can usually get some Americans to get mad at Europe, think that they’re so fancy, think that they’re kind of weak and they depend on us and we saved their bacon in World War II. There’s a history of that discourse with France in particular.

But with Canada, there is a big blue-collar population. I know I just said it before, but they have their own diesel class, and they send us crude oil, which is also the source of diesel, the same way it’s the source of gasoline for non-diesel cars. And so this just feels wrong from all sides.

Sargent: I was talking to the Democratic candidate in the House district in Macomb County a while ago, and she was basically telling me that people in that part of Michigan just see themselves as being part of a network that includes Canada, which of course is right across the river in Detroit.

And so—this is Macomb County, which is the home of the Reagan Democrat and so forth, really industrial, central auto manufacturing. And the auto industry for many decades as well has been kind of viewed as this kind of unified thing between Canada and America. It’s not like there’s a U.S. auto industry and a Canada auto industry. They’re one thing.

And so I really do think that something kind of profound is happening here, where, positive-sum relationships with Canadians are getting a second look, in a way, from people who have been told that they should be nationalists, MAGA nationalists.

And so I’m hopeful that there’s actually the possibility here that some of these voters could just understand just how deeply Trump and MAGA and right-wing populist nationalists have been scamming them. Is that too much to hope for?

Heffernan: I think that’s absolutely right. And it’s sort of what Canada’s Mark Carney has said, which is that once Trump started threatening to colonize Canada, he said something like, you can’t unsee it. So he said, basically, once that happened, it was like you’re in a partnership, even a marriage, and suddenly someone flexes that they’ve got all the money, the house belongs to them, they could, beat you up at any time.

And you just don’t come back from that, right? Like, you start socking away your resources and forming other alliances outside the marriage, and you plan to leave. And Carney said, even if we get an ex-president, the jig’s up with this. We’re not doing this.

And I think that that is a way that the voters are feeling, which is like, this thing that we thought was so stable can come apart with the wrong president. It can come apart. And this threat that prices may never go back down, and that they’re expected to jump more—this thing can be destroyed if someone’s determined to do it. And I think Carney’s right. We all can’t unsee that.

Sargent: It’s really almost unbelievable. If you were trying to destroy what’s good about the United States, you would basically do what Donald Trump is doing, pretty much across the board, right?

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, are you missing—do you ever miss the old World Cup days? That was just last summer, that we had that romance where even Canadians said, these people are so friendly. And the French said everyone’s so friendly, and we love your Buc-ee’s and your Big Gulps.

Well, we still have our Buc-ee’s and our Big Gulps, but it seems like we are perilously low on democracy and rule of law. And that seems to be alienating people even more than bottomless Olive Garden bowls of pasta made them briefly like us.

Sargent: Well, and also we seem perilously low on respect for our longtime allies and friends. And we seem perilously low on, you know, decency.

Heffernan: Yeah, the decency, exactly. I mean, the other thing that Macron cited, in addition to democracy and the rule of law, was free trade, which you’ve brought up, but it’s worth bringing up again.

To imagine that America would become protectionist like this, to this extent, with tariffs of all things, predicated on—you brought up Peter Navarro—just the harebrained craziness. Do you remember, like, when they rolled out the tariffs and they’d been made by ChatGPT, and there was no rhyme or reason to it? It’s just some kind of caprice with these guys.

They have some idea that tariffs are going to be good for us. Then we have the TACO period, of Trump chickening out on really doing tariffs. And now here we are, with rising prices. And no truck driver, no matter how made-in-the-USA he is, is going to say that we need to shut out this trading partner of Canada. We just have a sentimental attachment to Canada that can’t be broken.

Sargent: Well, let me ask you this, Virginia, just to close this out. Is it possible that a decisive victory for Democrats in the midterms sends a renewed message to the rest of the world that we’re trying to get onto the right side of decency and really trying to shrug off this catastrophe that Trump has become for us? I’m not sure if the rest of the world is ready to give us a pass next time.

Heffernan: I worry about that. And certainly at the midterms, I mean, I’m sure they will cheer on any impeachment efforts, or any efforts to undo, you know, Trump’s disastrous policies toward other countries.

And if people are—their emotions—to get out of the war, or at least stop supplying Trump with endless weapons to prosecute that war, they will applaud those efforts. But I don’t know they’re going to trust us again anytime soon.

Sargent: God, that’s dark. Virginia Heffernan, that’s why we have you on. Thank you so much for coming on.

Heffernan: Thank you so much, Greg.

Fifty years ago, in his most famous work, the prolific intellectual Carlo Cipolla argued that stupid people, as a group, are “much more powerful than the mafia, or the military industrial complex.”

Today, as we witness one of the dumbest wars in history unraveling in Iran, an inept health and human services secretary working to bring back measles and polio, a Republican Party wherein only 20 percent view the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a violent insurrection but 71 percent deny Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and an administration that refuses to properly regulate AI and crypto industries that threaten the economic well-being and safety of all, Cipolla’s contention is as apt now as when he first proposed it in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, in 1976—an era when the country, and indeed the world, was similarly roiled by sociopolitical rage and seemed on the brink of a catastrophe.

An Italian economic historian and UC-Berkeley professor who’d seen fascism firsthand and was writing in the wake of the Vietnam War, Cipolla wanted to determine how advanced societies commit truly stupid acts. Originally crafted for his friends, but selling over half a million copies once published, his treatise lies somewhere between satire and serious scholarship, involving a bit of humor and speculation while also applying the laws and language of scientific inquiry and a valid argumentative style. As he wrote in the introduction:

Let me point out at this juncture that most emphatically this little book is neither a product of cynicism nor an exercise in defeatism—no more than a book on microbiology is. The following pages are in fact the result of a constructive effort to detect, know, and thus possibly neutralize one of the most powerful dark forces that hinder the growth of human welfare and happiness.

Cipolla divided people into four groups: the helpless, whose actions harm themselves but benefit others; the intelligent, whose actions benefit themselves and others; the bandits, who enrich themselves while harming others; and the stupid, whose actions harm others while producing no benefit to themselves. This latter group is Cipolla’s main concern. “No matter how high are one’s estimates of human stupidity,” he wrote, “one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid; b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one’s activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.”

Undoubtedly, you’re pondering all of the stupid people you know. But the real danger, Cipolla contended, is when stupid people gain power, exponentially increasing the danger to us all. In this scenario, the stupid will have at their disposal means of destruction created by the intelligent—armies, weapons systems, monetary levers, media influence—and will oversee industries often controlled or influenced by bandits, weakening the institutions designed to monitor them. Imagine, if you will, if an extraordinarily stupid man were to somehow become secretary of defense, jeopardizing both our soldiers and our position in the world while also promoting a testosterone-based culture that could damage our forces for years. To avoid this, Cipolla said, it is the job of the intelligent to keep the stupid in check. If they fail to do so, societies head downhill fast.

Such a fate is not easy to avoid in democracies, which are plagued by the stupid. “Within a democratic system, general elections are a most effective instrument to ensure the steady maintenance of [stupid people] among the powerful,” Cipolla wrote. This is because politicians often have to appeal to the stupid in order to maintain power, ensuring that stupid politicians will always make up a fraction of government officials.

We cannot say for sure what Cipolla would have made of President Trump’s efforts to build a giant ballroom at the White House, his spending countless hours posting social media memes of himself, the nearly $200 million taxpayers have footed for his golf outings, or the UFC and Grand Prix events he hosted at the White House. In fact, it’s difficult to even say whether Trump is more a bandit or just plain stupid—or whether his administration is filled with more obvious bandits who are simply in it for themselves, like Scott Bessent and Marco Rubio, or crazy idiots who actually think they’re doing some good while sailing us toward disaster, like Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. But it’s likely Cipolla, who died in 2000, would’ve given high marks on the stupidity scale to the administration overall, and seen it as a validation of his theory.

The theory rest on five “laws,” which are as follows:

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

The second rule—the idea that stupidity is universal among groups and independent of other characteristics, including wealth, education, and social status—is somewhat counterintuitive, but think about some of the Ivy League fools we see in government today: Ted Cruz (Harvard), RFK Jr. (Harvard), Sam Alito (Yale), Clarence Thomas (Yale), Josh Hawley (Yale). Or rich morons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. In fact, even more dangerous than a stupid person with power is a stupid person with power and credentials—they’re more likely to think they actually know what they’re talking about.

Cipolla allowed, as well, that certain people may shift from one classification to another. Andrew Carnegie, for instance, might be considered a bandit for the first half of his life and an intelligent benefactor for the latter half. Some people might even seem helpless one day and stupid the next. To account for this, Cipolla ruled that we must go by overall average behavior, and he created a four-quadrant chart—like New York magazine’s “Approval Matrix”—for mapping people according to their helplessness, intelligence, banditry, and stupidity.

Among the helpless Cipolla counted those who are self-sacrificing as well as those who are perhaps just plain hapless, so the name is a bit of a misnomer. It would mean that Clara Barton, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King might be a part of that category, though one could argue, too, that each received the benefit of working toward a more just and equitable society. It’s also difficult to say that they were not intelligent, as they clearly were.

If we were to do a current-day chart, you would find most of the Trump administration leadership in either the “bandit” or “stupid” quadrant—though their exact coordinates on the chart would undoubtedly be a matter of debate. Some might reasonably argue that Trump himself should be on the stupid side. I’d put him close to there, as many of the things he does are just plain stupid. But I contend that his utter stupidity cannot match his unadulterated greed, so I would put him in the “bandit” quadrant but right beside “stupid”—and as far away from “intelligent” as possible. Other top Republicans in that quadrant might include Mike Johnson, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, JD Vance, and Kash Patel, while those more worthy of the “stupid” quadrant are RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Tommy Tuberville.

What puts the United States in an unusually dangerous position, though, is the peculiar mix of smart and stupid we’re experiencing right now. The scientists who built the atomic bomb and helped us win World War II were keenly aware of the dangers posed. After the war, Robert Oppenheimer advocated for limitations and cooperation, understanding the nuclear age we had entered. Harry Truman—a capable president—was smart enough to put our nuclear program under civilian control.

Compare that to Washington’s utter failure to regulate AI, even though the leading AI firms themselves are warning that their technology could destroy humanity. As the most advanced AI models become increasingly emboldened, breaking out of their sandboxes and attacking government websites, the GOP-controlled Congress has largely looked the other way while Trump babbles about renaming artificial intelligence as “super intelligence.”

It’s like we built a hydrogen bomb, then entrusted Gordon Gekko to make a profit off it and Barney Fife to monitor him. What could go wrong?

Everything, according to Cipolla’s theory. “In a country that is moving downhill,” he wrote, the “fraction of stupid people” remains constant; “however, in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity ... and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals.… Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid population] and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.”

It may be too soon to know whether we’re on that course in the U.S. We may not know until it’s far too late. But it’s alarming enough that Cipolla’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek theory from a half-century ago seems perfectly apt to the state of America today.

For the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has been noodling on a diesel export ban as a strategy for lowering fuel costs. As of this weekend, he is still “thinking about it very seriously,” despite strident opposition from the U.S. energy industry.

“That can oftentimes lead to a little bit of an increase on gasoline for cars, so we’re looking at it very seriously. We may do it,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. But implementing such a ban could backfire, with such consequences ranging from lower production by U.S. refineries and higher gasoline prices to a disruption of the global economy.

Although the price of diesel may seem esoteric to an individual whose only vehicles run on gasoline, it is intertwined with the larger U.S. economy. Diesel powers such heavy machinery as construction equipment, trucks, buses, ships, and tractors. If higher diesel prices drive up the cost of shipping goods, that extra expense will be reflected in the price tag of those items.

In theory, a person can decide to use less gasoline, resolve to drive less, or purchase an electric vehicle. But diesel use is something from which we don’t get to opt out.

“It’s almost impossible for you to extract diesel from your life as long as you buy groceries, or something on Amazon,” said Rory Johnston, an oil market researcher and founder of Commodity Context. “Your E.V. was likely delivered on a truck that was fueled by diesel.”

Diesel prices topped $6.38 per gallon this week. This is a result of the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has severely constricted crude oil exports from the Middle East. But other factors have played a role, including the destruction of Russian refineries by Ukraine and a diesel export ban by both Russia and China. As diesel exports have plummeted from other sources, the United States has been the only country to lift its global supply.

The theory behind restricting or banning diesel exports is that more diesel would remain in the country, and therefore fuel costs would go down: If you ship out less, you keep in more. But the reality of that scenario would be more complicated. The U.S. already produces around 5.3 million barrels per day of distillate fuels, which include diesel, but the domestic demand is only around 3.6 million barrels. Refiners on the Gulf Coast rely on trade to absorb that surplus; if exports are banned, around 1.5 million barrels per day of diesel would be “stranded,” according to analysts at S&P Global.

These risks have left oil industry stakeholders in a tizzy. The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers have warned that such a ban would “reduce U.S. fuel production, put upward pressure on prices, weaken energy security and hand market share to foreign competitors.” It’s a concern echoed by the folks at the American Petroleum Institute, who fear that a fuel surplus would lead to refineries producing less gasoline and jet fuel along with reducing diesel production.

The U.S. produces diesel at a structural surplus, and there is room for refineries to stockpile diesel if it is unable to be exported. But eventually, refineries will no longer have a reason to continue processing as much crude oil.

“You are going to destroy the financial incentive to process these barrels in the first place, and these refiners will begin cutting runs,” said Johnston. S&P Global analysts predict refiners would ultimately need to cut crude runs by 1.9 million barrels per day.

Commodity analysts at Goldman Sachs have predicted that an export ban would initially lead to a decrease in prices—but only until diesel storage is full. Because different fuels are produced together, such an action would put “upward pressure on gasoline prices,” according to a memo by Goldman Sachs. The bank estimated that gasoline prices could increase by $0.30 per week.

A diesel export ban would also have global repercussions. With less diesel coming from the Middle East, China, and Russia, other countries across the world have been more reliant on American oil. According to API, the U.S. currently supplies around 20 percent of the roughly eight million barrels of diesel traded globally per day. Diesel prices continue to spike largely because the U.S. is the primary source for buyers. This past summer, diesel exports hit a record of 1.9 million barrels per day. In short: Cutting access to U.S. diesel would be immediately felt across the world.

“If taken to the extreme, you have a situation where the United States, the preeminent global refining hub on the planet, is cutting back refining runs at a time when refining capacity has never been tighter globally,” said Johnston.

Other countries are bracing for this possibility. Dan Jorgensen, the European Union’s energy commissioner, recently sent a note to member nations urging them to cut gas and electricity consumption.

“It is not in the interests of anybody, not the U.S., not us, to not have as free a flow of energy as possible in these difficult times,” Johnston told reporters at a meeting of European ministers.

The president may choose to restrict diesel exports rather than fully banning them. Trump administration officials certainly seem wary of extreme measures. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been adamant that a full ban on diesel is not in consideration, saying last week that “nobody wants a full blanket ban or zero exports of diesel.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said earlier in September that such a ban would not lower prices in the long run.

That said, there is considerable political calculation behind support for an export ban. Republicans are in danger of losing control of both chambers of Congress in the November midterm elections, and increased costs do not make for a winning message. Moreover, higher diesel prices could discourage farm producers—generally a reliable GOP voting bloc—from supporting Republican candidates, or casting a ballot at all. Some Iowa lawmakers have been particularly vocal in their support for an export ban, including Representatives Zach Nunn and Marianette Miller-Meeks, both of whom are locked in tight reelection battles.

But if the Trump administration wants to ban or restrict diesel exports with the goal of easing prices, there isn’t much time left to act. The election is just over one month away, and lower diesel prices would not be immediately reflected at the grocery store, for example.

“They’re running out of time for it to matter to voters,” said Johnston. “It takes time for it to hit the wholesale market, then from there it takes time to hit the retail market.”

“We’re going to hold the crooks accountable,” House Democratic leader Hakim Jeffries told the Associated Press last week in anticipation of the Democrats’ likely retaking the House on November 3. (The political forecaster Charlie Cook says a Democratic House is a “done deal” and a Democratic Senate “very realistic.”) Leading House oversight hearings, Jeffries explained to Reuters a couple of days later, will be Reps. Jamie Raskin, who’s in line to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Robert Garcia, who’s in line to become chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. If the Democrats retake the Senate, then Raskin’s and Garcia’s counterparts will be Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, who’s in line to become chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Richard Blumenthal, who’s in line to become chair of the Senate Committee on Investigations.

Raskin told the AP that overseeing “systemic corruption” under President Donald Trump is a “gargantuan” task, and Raskin and Blumenthal both advised Reuters that no definitive list of top-priority targets yet exists. So much corruption, so little time! 

There is of course plenty to investigate with no corruption angle per se, just catastrophic and/or illegal governance. For example: You could hold an entire hearing to calculate how many people Robert Kennedy, Jr., has killed as Health and Human Services Secretary (though lately a corruption angle on Kennedy has surfaced, too, involving $4 million in book advances and free flights to Fiji and Greece). Certainly Kennedy has not killed as many people as Pete Hegseth has by dropping bombs on fishing boats in the Caribbean that may or may not be conveying drugs (234 dead). Not to mention the other couple thousand civilians Hegseth’s killed in an Iran war nobody wants. And Hegseth and Kennedy are pikers compared to the triumvirate of Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Marco Rubio. By shutting down US AID these three people, one of them a devout Christian fundamentalist, have killed 781,343, according to an estimate by ImpactCounter.com, of whom 518,428 were children. According to the Gates Foundation, child deaths, which since 2000 have been cut in half globally, rose worldwide in 2025—the first increase of this century. Gentlemen, take a bow. Now raise your right hand.

But if the Democrats hope specifically to hold crooks accountable, by which I presume Jeffries and Raskin mean kleptocrats who use their governmental positions to line their pockets, they will need to assemble a list of top-priority targets. Not being quite so busy these days as Raskin, Garcia, Whitehouse, and Blumenthal, I’ve come up with the following five. At the very least, I think it’s a strong first cut.

The UAE AI Chips Affair. The mother of all Trump family financial scandals. It begins with a president-elect of the United States entering into a business partnership with a foreign nation four days before his second inauguration. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who runs the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates (Tahnoon is also brother to the UAE president) purchased, for $500 million, a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, or WLF. WLF is a cryptocurrency company, created two months before the 2024 election, in which the Trump family owns a 38 percent equity stake (initially it was 60 percent), and from which the Trump family extracts 75 percent of net proceeds from token sales, even though nobody in the Trump family appears to have invested a dime in WLF. The UAE partnership deal was signed by Trump’s son Eric.

Sheikh Tahnoon also put $31 million into business entities associated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a WLF co-founder (his son Zach is chief executive of WLF). Before the money changed hands Witkoff was named Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. The UAE, please note, is situated in the Middle East.

That all happened in January 2025. In May of that year Sheikh Tahnoon purchased $2 billion of a WLF stablecoin called USD1 to invest in Binance. This transaction was arranged by a felon named Changpeng Zhao, who’d spent four months at the Federal Correctional Complex Lompoc for violating various securities laws. He was also Binance’s chief executive until his 2023 plea deal required him to step down. Zhao supplied WLF with more than a dozen Binance engineers to help set up USD1. Five months later, Trump pardoned Zhao. An October Wall Street Journal piece suggests the pardon was understood by both sides to be payback for Zhao’s invaluable help in launching WLF.

Sheikh Tahnoon got an even bigger payback. He’d been lobbying the Trump administration to allow the UAE to purchase advanced AI chips that the Biden administration previously denied that nation. The Biden administration denied UAE the chips because it had pretty good evidence that a company of which Tahnoon was chairman shared advanced technology with China, which in turn used that tech to upgrade its long-range missiles—missiles that could be used to shoot down United States jet fighters should the United States try to halt a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Intel was flashing red,” one former US official told Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times last October. Tahnoon’s company, G42, has denied that it shared the technology.

Two weeks after UAE’s $2 billion stablecoin purchase (and only four months after the UAE purchased 49 percent of WLF) the White House green-lighted UAE’s purchase of the advanced AI chips. Steve Witkoff was involved in this transaction himself! In dollar terms, this is the biggest bribery scandal in United States history. It makes Teapot Dome look like shoplifting a candy bar. And unlike Teapot Dome, this scandalous transaction enriched a sitting president.

Witkoff should be called to testify. WLF said at the time of the chips announcement that Wikoff was “in the process of fully divesting from WLF.” But three months later a financial disclosure form showed that Witkoff still owned a piece of WLF. Zach Witkoff also looks like a promising witness, if only because he has a big mouth.

Trump’s IRS Indemnity. Trump filed a $10 million lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service last January over the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times. The tax returns leaked during Trump’s first term, so in effect Trump was suing himself, and the lawsuit was filed during Trump’s second term, so in effect Trump was negotiating a settlement with himself (via a Justice department over which Trump exercises improper control). The settlement was that Trump would get a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” (i.e., slush) fund to compensate people Trump believed were prosecuted unjustly, plus immunity from any pending tax audits. In July, District Court Judge Kathleen Williams voided both settlements. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche then rescinded the anti-weaponization fund. He did not rescind the indemnification agreement.

Nobody puts it past Trump that he might try to revive the slush fund, whose cancellation (like its creation) is, for complicated reasons, a matter of some legal doubt. But the main question for congressional investigators is what, if anything, the Internal Revenue Service did in response to that indemnification deal that Blanche never rescinded. Was Trump being audited? Is he being audited now? Were existing audits cancelled? These questions should be answerable in a congressional hearing even if the content of those audits must remain confidential. 

Pete Hegseth’s Blood-Money Insider Trade. In March, the Financial Times broke the story that a Morgan Stanley broker representing Pete Hegseth attempted to make a multimillion dollar investment in defense companies on the eve of the Iran War. The broker approached BlackRock about Hegseth investing in BlackRock’s Defense Industrials Active Exchange ETF, or exchange traded fund. An ETF is sort of similar to a mutual fund but it bundles multiple stocks and bonds into a single financial instrument that trades like a stock. A Pentagon spokesman denied Hegseth’s broker made any such inequiry, but the FT had three sources confirming that he did. Advantage: FT.

The purchase never took place because, for some reason, BlackRock’s Defense Industrials Active Exchange ETF was not available to Morgan Stanley clients. Conceivably BlackRock threw a boulder in Hegseth’s path because it understood these discussions were destined to become the subject of an investigation. According to the FT, the matter was “flagged internally.” That means multiple BlackRock employees who know about this should be available for Congress to subpoena. 

My guess is BlackRock also created an internal paper trail, because if you were BlackRock and you’d “flagged internally” a blatantly corrupt attempt by a sitting secretary of defense to get rich off the war he was overseeing, wouldn’t you create a paper trail so that nobody later could accuse you of misbehavior? As I noted last March, this is low-hanging investigatory fruit. All that’s really necessary is to send a few subpoenas to BlackRock.

Trump’s Memecoin Racket. Trump made more than $2 billion in income in 2025, according to his June financial disclosure. The single biggest component was licensing fees for a memecoin called $TRUMP that Trump hawked on social media. It earned Trump $635 million. Two thirds of all investors in the $TRUMP memecoin—988,905 people, according to the crypto analytics firm Nansen—lost a total of $3.81 billion. ($TRUMP briefly traded at about $73 in January 2025; as I write this it’s trading at about $2.) But for Trump it’s all upside because he collects a transaction fee on every $TRUMP trade, including $TRUMP tokens sold by MAGA suckers at a loss. Nice work if you can get it.

Trump’s swindle of credulous followers is an interesting angle for investigators to follow, but an even more interesting angle would be to study the motives of people who buy $TRUMP in sufficient quantities to score an invitation to a VIP reception with Trump. This group appears willing to lose money on Trump memecoins so long as it gains them access to Trump. Trump’s hosted two such receptions. In 2025, the attendees were 25 investors who held, according to the Financial Times, a median $3.2 million in near-worthless $TRUMP memecoins. In 2026 the attendees were 29 investors who held a median of $539,000 in even-more-worthless $TRUMP memecoins. The top purchaser in both contests was Justin Sun, whom the Securities and Exchange Commission charged with fraud in 2023. Curiously enough, in March the SEC settled the case for a paltry $10 million and on social media Sun pronounced himself “very pleased.” Sun is an obvious star witness to any investigation, but other contest winners should be called to testify also; FT said in April that it was able to identify 27 of the 29 most recent attendees (though, exasperatingly, it didn’t say who they were).

Diplomacy For Sale. We come, finally, to the sprawling Trump family. Donald, Jr., is of course a fat target and merits investigation for various suspicious investments, including in several defense companies, one of them a startup that received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon after White House aide Peter Navarro intervened, according to a May ProPublica investigation. (Don, Jr., “formed a close bond in recent years” with Navarro, ProPublica’s Robert Faturechi reported, and even visited Navarro when he was in prison for defying a congressional subpoena.)  There was also the matter of Don, Jr.’s wedding afterparty in the Bahamas, bankrolled to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollar by Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close enough to Putin that Ukraine imposed sanctions on him. This story (also broken by Pro Publica) was lurid enough to prompt Senator John Curtis of Utah, an actual Republican, to call on the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate. 

Tempting though Don, Jr., is, I think it would be wisest to start with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, because Kushner is peddling influence even as he works for Trump’s administration as a sort of ambassador-at-large negotiating, in partnership with Witkoff, peace deals in Israel, Iran, and Ukraine. Earlier this month Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker reported:

A classified report produced by a European intelligence agency states that Trump and people around him have discussed several potential contracts in Russia. The report is not dated, but the European official who gave it to me said that the details were first discussed sometime after Trump invited Putin to Anchorage, in August, 2025. 

The proposed business ventures mentioned in this classified report were strikingly specific:

The document lists ten potential ventures, which it says appear to “have been originally designed by the Kremlin’s political and business elites.” They include reopening the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under American control, resuming ExxonMobil’s operations in Sakhalin, and drilling for oil in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the report, there was discussion of unfreezing Russian assets that are held under American sanctions. The document mentions people who might participate, including Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner.

A Kushner spokesperson told Filkins that no United States officials would profit from the deals under discussion. But Kushner’s $6 billion venture capital firm, Affinity Partners, is already funded in large part by sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, all of them situated, of course, in that same Middle East where Kushner is negotiating peace deals (or anyway trying to). After Kushner joined the Trump administration he personally solicited $5 billion in investments, according to a March 2026 report by Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell in The New York Times. 

Affinity, though possibly not Kushner himself, approached the Saudis this year to increase their investment. The Saudis already invested $2 billion in Affinity back in 2021 over the objections of its sovereign wealth funds advisers, who pronounced Affinity “unsatisfactory in all aspects” and in particular judged “excessive” its proposed management fee. But that was before Kushner re-entered government to negotiate peace deals in, among other places, the Middle East. “Mr. Kushner’s fund-raising,” The Times’s Copeland and Maureen Farrell reported, “is expected to stretch on for the better part of this year.” I would guess many affinities have been identified.

An investigation of Affinity Partners should be a top priority.

Those are my top five scandals to investigate. There are, of course, many other kleptocracy scandals, many of which I’ve documented (see “The Trump Family’s Ever-Expading Portfolio of Corruption,” March 2025, and “How Trump May Be Cashing In On A Weakening Dollar,” October 2025, and “Trump’s New Bank Is His Most Naked Scandal Yet,” August 2026). But Democrats will need to pace themselves. These five represent, I think, the most promising initial pr0jects.

James Talarico may or may not win the Senate race in Texas. But here’s something we can say right now: Given how close Talarico is coming in this red state after running such an overtly pro-immigrant campaign—which Talarico has done on and off from the outset—it should shape how Democrats handle the immigration issue going forward pretty dramatically.

There’s a paradox at the center of Talarico’s spirited bid. He’s running in a state that Donald Trump carried by 14 points in 2024. Yet he’s actually leaned into the moral issues around immigration more aggressively than most other Democrats running in tough areas have this cycle, despite it being widely touted as Trump’s “strength.” Democrats can learn from this—and not in the ways they might think.

Last week, during extended remarks in Austin, Talarico seized on the news that ICE shot a local Venezuelan immigrant in the back—he’s now in detention—to make an expansive moral case that immigration is good for our country. He called for “more legal pathways” for immigrants to come here and “live the American dream,” which he said would make our country “richer and stronger.”

In those remarks, Talarico called for those broadened legal pathways on top of a path to citizenship for longtime undocumented residents and increased border security. In short, Talarico called for more legal immigration, said this would benefit our country, and even declared: “I think most Texans support all of those goals.”

Lurking behind this declaration—that a majority of Texans support all those things—is a genuine theory of the case. It’s that Trump’s agenda—the masked ICE thugs snatching grandmas and children, the killings of U.S. citizens, the overt white nationalism in official government communications—has opened the door to creating a new pro-immigrant consensus, even in a place Trump won overwhelmingly. By delivering such a message in Texas so frontally, Talarico is already on the road to accomplishing something potentially seismic.

Here’s why. After Trump’s 2024 victory, some observers suggested his gains among Hispanics in the Latino-heavy Rio Grande Valley, along the Mexican border, suggested he’d forged a new, multi-racial working-class coalition. In that narrative, even Latino U.S. citizens were gravitating toward Trump’s anti-immigrant restrictionism in a durable realignment that would change U.S. politics.

But now that dream seems to be coming apart. This is very visible in the Texas Senate race, where Trump is badly alienating Latinos—mostly because of the economy, but also due to immigration—and leading them to support Talarico.

I’ve obtained new data that drives the point home. In August, Texas Southern University polled three competitive House districts in Texas—the 15th, 28th, and 34th. These Latino-heavy districts, which abut the border’s southernmost portions, all swung hard toward Trump, heavily driving the “realignment” narrative. Yet the poll found the Democratic challenger leading the GOP incumbent in the 15th by five points, and the Democratic incumbents leading their GOP challengers in the 28th and 34th by 11 and three points respectively.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I asked for the survey’s breakdown of how Latinos in the districts view Trump on these issues. The answer: In Texas’s 15th, only 36 percent of Latinos approve of Trump on immigration and border security, while 61 percent disapprove—25 points underwater. In the 28th, that’s 36-60, or 24 points underwater. And in the 34th, that’s 36-62—26 points underwater.

“They thought they were getting a secure border and public safety, not the deportation of friends, co-workers, fellow parishioners, and relatives,” Mark Jones, who co-directs the Texas Southern University poll, told me, speaking about Texas Latinos.

Talarico’s campaign sees the Rio Grande Valley as critical. He rolled out his immigration plan there, and he’s done around a dozen events in the region. The region’s turn against Trump helps explain why Talarico’s getting around 60 percent support from Latinos statewide—a huge turnaround from 2024, when Trump won 55 percent of them.

In one sense, these numbers are not good enough. Political consultant Mike Madrid, an expert on the Latino vote, argues that this might not be happening without the bad economy. He notes that Trump’s ability to still reach the mid-30s with Latinos on immigration—despite all he’s done—suggests Democrats must do more to turn them into a pro-Dem voting bloc, rather than a swing constituency.

But this also suggests a big opening. Trump has thrown away his 2024 gains with these voters, meaning Democrats can try to seal the deal long-term. In redder areas, they can lead with the economy and border security, and pair that with a welcoming message for immigrants, which is now sellable even in red areas due to Trump’s savage inhumanity. “Democrats have been given a golden opportunity, a second chance to reconstitute a working- class coalition,” Madrid says.

It should also be acknowledged that one reason for Talarico’s gains is likely that Talarico has distanced himself from Joe Biden’s immigration record, repeatedly declaring that Biden failed on the border. Talarico’s plan is also heavy on adding border security. “That’s where the conversation begins,” Madrid notes.

Talarico alludes to this himself with one of his frequent formulations: “Our border should be like a front porch—it should have a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door.” The “lock” is important. But let’s not neglect the “welcome mat” part.

After all, Talarico’s plan calls for ICE to deprioritize the removals of longtime undocumented residents while focusing on dangerous criminals. It calls for a path to citizenship for many undocumented groups, though it’s not the large-scale amnesty that Senate Democrats passed in 2013 (which the GOP House killed). It would create new legal pathways for immigrants to come here and work. It would maintain channels for asylum-seekers and refugees while calling for more judges to adjudicate such claims faster.

It’s hard to evaluate this without more details. Would it mean going back to Biden-era levels of refugee admission? A resumption of Temporary Protected Status for groups facing horrific home-country conditions, which Trump has largely killed? Tougher standards for achieving asylum here than under previous Democratic presidents? Talarico’s campaign has not elaborated.

But in its broad strokes, this is a humane, pro-immigrant agenda. Talarico’s baseline values hold that immigration is good, it enriches our country in innumerable ways, and we should facilitate and encourage it, including among those seeking humanitarian sojourn here.

True, if there is space for this message to resonate now, it may be because Trump mostly closed down the border, creating the impression that undocumented immigration has been “solved.” Which might mean that in difficult territory, Democrats now have to convey—as Talarico does—that they won’t allow a reversion to the Biden-era status quo ante. Explaining how to accomplish this while rebuilding a far more humane system is a genuinely difficult challenge.

But still, the ingredients are coming together for a big Democratic reset. “Most Americans are pro-immigrant,” Talarico said during the Austin event. “Throughout American history, immigrants have always made us richer and stronger.” He rejected the idea that “you’ve got to pick between security and welcoming the stranger,” adding: “We don’t have to pick between those things.”

Talarico, who regularly speaks about his faith, is consciously using Biblical language here. The duty to “welcome the stranger” is deeply felt in American life, as Bill Kristol has argued, and not just as a religious duty. The suffering and injustice borne by the immigrants all around us—our “neighbors,” as Talarico put it—have become crushingly omnipresent facts of life as the banal cruelties of Late Stage Trumpism relentlesly grind us down.

But win or lose, Talarico has already demonstrated that even in deep-red Texas, people want something higher, something better. We all do. Democrats: Don’t hold back. Speak to this still-flickering sense of hopefulness forthrightly and unflinchingly.

“Hoax.” “Witch hunt.” “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

For a decade, Donald Trump has incessantly claimed that there was no Moscow assault on the 2016 election and that the subsequent investigations of Vladimir Putin’s covert interference in that contest, and the contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia, were all a phony Deep State plot orchestrated to destroy him. He even railed against the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” in his recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly, a week after the news broke that a Putin crony had attended and covered hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills for Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding celebration in the Bahamas.

Trump has been lying about all this. Multiple inquiries have produced much evidence showing that Putin messed with the 2016 election to boost Trump’s chances. Even a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee investigation overseen by then-Sen. Marco Rubio concluded in a 2020 report that Putin “ordered” the Russian operation in part to “help the Trump campaign” and that Trump aided Putin’s operation by “minimizing Russian involvement.” 

Yet Trump has essentially won the messaging war over the Russia scandal. Putin’s intervention—which included a hack-and-leak operation that targeted and impeded Hillary Clinton’s campaign and an extensive covert social media campaign that pumped divisive posts, including pro-Trump material, into the feeds of American voters—was one of several factors that contributed to Trump’s narrow victory that year. And Trump, in what was arguably an act of betrayal of country, aided and abetted a foreign adversary’s attack on American democracy by echoing and affirming Putin’s denials that he had meddled in the election. But all of this is barely mentioned these days. Not by Democrats. Not by many in the media. 

Trump’s claims of Deep State persecution, though, still rings out—and not merely as a personal pet peeve. At his urging, the Justice Department is pursuing a baseless criminal investigation of former officials in the Obama and Biden administrations who participated in Trump-Russia investigations, looking to prove the existence of a grand conspiracy against Trump. And his puzzling relationship with Putin remains significant, as Trump charts an erratic course regarding the war in Ukraine and pursues his own war against Iran, which is drawing crucial support from Russia, which is passing satellite targeting and other intelligence to Tehran and sharing missile technology. Discussing the conflict in Ukraine, Trump has at times characterized Putin and himself as co-victims of “Russia, Russia, Russia”—as if it were a bonding experience that affects his approach to the war in Ukraine. Over the objections of the United States’ closest allies, Trump has invited Putin to attend the upcoming G20 meeting that will be held in a Trump resort in Florida. 

How Trump Won the Russia Battle… 

Despite their relevance to today, the 2016 Russian attack and Trump’s complicity have been memory-holed. Neither were prominent issues in the 2020 and 2024 elections—even though during those campaigns, Russian intelligence again mounted operations to tarnish the Democrats. In 2020, a Ukrainian legislator named Andriy Derkach, who was a Russian agent, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, to spread false claims of Joe Biden corruption (this is according to Trump’s own Treasury Department, which sanctioned Derkach). In 2024, Russian disinformation operatives pushed a host of fake allegations about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, including the false charge that Walz had inappropriately touched a student when he taught high school—an allegation seen by millions of social media users. Trump dismissed reports of these Kremlin interventions with his all-too familiar “Russia, Russia, Russia” mantra.

Some might consider Trump’s complicity with acts of (information) warfare against the United States to be a bigger scandal than Watergate, Iran-contra, or other presidential disgraces. So how has he gotten away with this? Trump’s triumph on the Russia front provides a lesson about his tactics—as well as those of the Democrats.

His strategy for surmounting the Russia scandal boiled down to deny, define, deflect, and repeat. 

When Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election first hit the headlines, Trump and his top aides responded simply: They denied any such thing had happened. It didn’t matter that experts and government officials confirmed the Kremlin’s interference. Trump and his crew kept insisting the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails and memos were not Russian operations. 

Next—without conceding Putin had interfered—they established a high bar for wrongdoing. Trump and his team insisted that there was no collusion between the Trump camp and Russia—that is, Trump and his aides had not directly conspired with Putin’s operatives to pull off this caper. They defined the scandal as turning on the question of whether there was proof of Trump’s participation in the Russian scheme. Trump had backed Putin’s denials and enthusiastically exploited the leaked material—even calling on Russia to hack Clinton. That could be viewed as serious misconduct for a presidential candidate. But Trump and his associates made collusion the issue. 

Not until long after the election did the public learn that top Trump campaign aides met with a Russian emissary at Trump Tower after being told she was part of the covert Kremlin effort to assist Trump and that during the race Paul Manafort, the chair of Trump’s campaign, was interacting with and sending internal polling data to a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer (according to the Senate intelligence report). Was any of this collusion? Perhaps. But collusion is not a legal term, and Trump and his defenders successfully contended that all that counted was whether he had played a part in the assault itself. (When special counsel Robert Mueller released his final report, he noted he had uncovered no evidence of Trump’s involvement in a criminal conspiracy, which allowed Trump and his loyalists to claim he was exonerated, though Mueller identified other acts of Trump wrongdoing and possible crimes, including obstruction of justice.)

Third, while denying there was any wrongdoing and defining the terms of the scandal to his advantage, Trump also engaged in a series of deflections. Looking to change the subject, he alleged that President Obama had spied on him during the 2016 campaign. (There was no evidence of that.) He and his allies also focused on the Steele dossier, a collection of memos that former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele had compiled for an opposition research firm retained by the Democrats. These memos, never meant for public consumption, contained gossip, speculation, and unproven allegations about Trump and Russia, including the claims that Trump had been filmed cavorting with sex workers during a Moscow visit and that Putin possessed blackmail material on him. 

Trump and his supporters worked hard to shift the entire Russia affair toward the Steele memos, falsely charging the Democrats had concocted the dossier to trigger a bogus investigation. (The Steele memos had nothing to do with the launch of the Russia investigation, as multiple probes have concluded.) They also fixated on the FBI’s improper use of the Steele information to obtain a surveillance warrant for a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named Carter Page—a violation of his civil liberties.

Trump and his advocates endlessly decried the Steele memos and the Page warrant—a serious matter—to distract from the Russian operation that helped Trump and Trump’s own actions that bolstered Putin’s denials. In 2019, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a member of the House intelligence committee, which investigated the Steele dossier, broke ranks by saying, “There is a Russian investigation without a dossier.” But Trump, MAGA, right-wing media, and top House Republicans insisted otherwise. They asserted that Trump was set up by the Steele dossier and deployed that conspiracy theory to discredit the entire Russia probe and all discussion of Putin’s assault.

In addition to denying, defining, and deflecting, Trump stuck with a tried-and-true marketing ploy. He repeated his shorthand dismissals of the Russia scandal. Over and over, he called it a hoax and a witch hunt, and whenever he was challenged or new information emerged, he wailed, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He’s done that for years. As new controversies arose—such as his handling of the Covid pandemic, the criminal investigations of his incitement of the January 6 riot, his swiping of top-secret documents when he left the White House in 2021, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—he branded them continuations of “Russia, Russia, Russia.” It became a bumper sticker slogan encapsulating his claim that he was the target of a never-ending plot waged by diabolical government officials. With his persistent “Russia, Russia, Russia” chant, he drowned out discussion of what actually occurred. He transformed one of the most serious scandals in U.S. history into a dismissive three-second soundbite. In the absence of a countervailing message, this worked. 

…And How the Democrats Lost It

Which brings us to the Democrats. Not only did Trump win this battle; the Democrats lost it. 

After the 2016 election, they did much to keep the Russia issue alive, demanding investigations and accusing Trump and his campaign of skullduggery. Some over-promised that evidence of collusion was soon to come. But after Mueller did not uncover a smoking gun on collusion, the Democrats mostly dropped the matter. Only Trump was interested in revisiting the Russia story—as a tale of nefarious Deep State conniving against him. 

You cannot win a war you do not fight. Not long ago, I asked Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island to explain why the Democrats gave up. He had not played a major role in the tussle over the Russia narrative. But for years he has released reports and delivered speeches on Republican and right-­ wing efforts to use “dark money” to shape the nation’s political conversation, and he has criticized his fellow Democrats for not vigorously countering the far right’s well-­financed messaging operations.

Whitehouse broke down the Democrats’ shortcoming into three parts: their nature, their infrastructure, and their bad habits. “As to our nature, we’re inclined to believe the truth will out,” he said. “Once you establish facts, you can move on. But propagandists and autocrats know that’s not true.” Their rule is simple: Keep banging the drum and never stop promoting fundamental falsehoods. That’s what Trump had done with his “Russia, Russia, Russia” slogan. 

As for infrastructure, Whitehouse pointed out, “We have no war room, no ops center in Democratic politics to see to it that long-­term fights are maintained. Meanwhile, conservative groups persist and persist, whatever the message is: the Deep State, climate denial, the Russia hoax. It’s hard to take on an institutional apparatus without one of your own.”

Regarding bad habits, he bemoaned that the Democrats hadn’t had “much fight in us for a while.” Biden, when he was president, was consumed by process and the quest for consensus; Barack Obama promised to be a post-­ partisan president. “It’s been a long time since we had a forceful Democratic bully pulpit that projects itself as strongly as Trump,” Whitehouse said. “We don’t have much memory as to what a fight is. We have a baseline belief we’re on the side of good and that will win out. But Trump just talked us into the ground.”

The Democrats, who initially were fierce in pursuing investigations and excoriating Trump for siding with Putin and exploiting Russia’s attack, could not maintain that level of intensity, as Trump hammered away with his hoax/witch hunt hogwash. After the Mueller report was released, it was time for them to move on. The Trump-­Russia scandal, as they saw it, was over. Even when it was clear during the 2020 and 2024 campaigns that Putin was targeting influence operations at Americans to benefit Trump, the Biden campaign and then the Biden administration did not make much noise about Moscow’s interventions. Nor did the Harris campaign.

The Mueller report was not the end of the story for Trump and the Republicans. They falsely contended it demonstrated the Russia investigation was a big nothing and absolved Trump, and they pressed this message as part of their unremitting, years-long campaign to obliterate the Russia scandal and remove the stain of Putin’s interference from Trump’s 2016 victory. They deftly turned the unproven allegation of collusion into an effective attack on the entire Trump-Russia narrative—­ and on their political opponents and the media. Ever since, Trump has constantly deployed his false depiction of the Trump-­Russia scandal to delegitimize all the criticism and accusations of wrongdoing he subsequently faced.

“Narrative construction and narrative maintenance is an essential and robust part of Trumpian politics,” Whitehouse said. “Everything runs second to that. Their narrative has been manipulative, purposeful, and combative. We Democrats, however, believe that reality and truth once established is solidly set.” But in politics, an unopposed narrative can conquer facts. 

For years, Trump and his MAGA Republicans have cast the Democrats as ferocious Machiavellian warriors fiercely conspiring around the clock with their behind-the-scenes allies to crush Trump and his movement. Yet Whitehouse considered his party mostly feeble in the messaging war against Trump, and its flaws had allowed Trump to not only survive the Russia scandal but to weaponize it against his political foes and critics.

Trump’s messaging-war tactics are far from foolproof. They haven’t worked in regard to the Iran war, his mass deportation crusade, or his economic policies. Perhaps that’s because the realities of these decisions are right in front of people. The war has not been won, and it has raised the cost of gasoline. Hundreds of thousands of people—many without criminal records—have been apprehended, with many brutally deported. And inflation has not been tamed. No matter how frequently Trump declares there is no affordability crisis (deny), current economic problems are Biden’s fault (define), and the Democrats are commies looking to destroy the nation (deflect), Americans can see and feel the consequences of these decisions.

In the case of the Trump-Russia scandal, with much of the story being a confusing tangle of accounts of clandestine actions, Trump had an easier time and could use his salesman and carnival barker talents to create and perpetuate a self-serving narrative, especially with the Democrats yielding the field.

This is not just a (one-sided) fight over history. With the war in Ukraine still raging and with Putin continuing his subterranean battle against the democracies of the West through covert influence and sabotage operation—as has been recently reported, his clandestine disinformation operatives are now targeting the midterm elections—a clear understanding of Trump’s relationship with Putin and Russia remains necessary. And though Trump is low in the polls, Democrats still must figure out how to forcefully engage in long-term narrative politics. Trump managed to survive the Russia scandal and prevail in that messaging battle.

His reliance on deceit and distraction may yet cause him to lose the larger war. But other scoundrels, no doubt, will follow his “Russia, Russia, Russia” example, and this episode, as well as the entire Trump era, shows us how vital it is that responsible politicians and journalists learn how to better confront the big lies of our political demagogues.     

Donald Trump’s ban on a range of Canadian imports just went into effect, and The New York Times calls this a sign that the trade war has grown “vicious.” In a rambling tirade this week, Trump upped the ante in a dark way, calling Canada “one of the worst countries in the entire world.” Trump also said almost in passing that we get along with China better than we get along with Canada. We think it shouldn’t pass unnoticed just how casually Trump will toss aside a longtime ally. Trump also unleashed his top trade adviser to say sneeringly nasty things about Canada and Canadians, another sign that MAGA nationalism is growing more malicious. Meanwhile, Republicans tell the Los Angeles Times that the trade war is really bad news for the GOP. In one focus group, almost all swing voters in Michigan opposed it. We talked to New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing well about the economic roots of GOP midterm woes. She explains why it’s so dumb of Trump to order Americans to hate Canada—and why it’s all tailor made to get MAGA-adjacent “diesel class” voters to turn on Trump. Listen to this episode here.

From here on out, a civil rights group will receive the same treatment in Florida as the likes of Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday the implementation of the “anti-sharia law” he signed earlier this year, officially designating 90 groups as terrorist organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the largest Muslim advocacy group in the nation.

Florida’s authority on the matter superseded the State Department, which does not list CAIR as a terrorist organization, thanks to a state law (H.B. 1471) that went into effect in July. That allowed Florida’s domestic security chief to officially identify terrorist organizations without the involvement of the federal government.

The state government proceeded with the matter without input from the public.

The Muslim Brotherhood and antifa also received the terror group designation. Other groups targeted by the action include the Venezuelan crime syndicate Tren de Aragua, two Mexican drug cartels, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran.

The groundwork for the new labels came by way of an executive order DeSantis signed last December. At the time, CAIR’s Florida chapter sued DeSantis, claiming that the order, which stripped the group’s access to state resources, was unconstitutional.

Another lawsuit from the group is expected following DeSantis’s latest action.  

“There is nowhere in that notice any allegation or evidence that CAIR has engaged in any violent or dangerous act in violation of Florida or U.S. law,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU National Security Project, said Tuesday following the decision, noting that the ACLU plans to file for a preliminary injunction on behalf of CAIR’s Florida chapter. “And that’s the first requirement for something as serious as this.”

Shamsi added that the “relentless” effort to label CAIR as a terrorist organization is “unnecessary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional.”

The food delivery driver shot by ICE agents last week, Venezuelan immigrant Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, was charged with one count of assaulting, resisting, interfering, and impeding a federal officer on Tuesday.

The Department of Justice accused Garcés Pérez of ignoring federal agents’ instructions and driving away from them when they tried to pull him over in Austin, Texas. As he left, the DOJ claimed, his driver’s side mirror hit one of the agents in the chest. An ICE agent said that after a short, high-speed car chase, Garcés Pérez tried to hit him with his car, at which point the agent said he shot into the car and hit Garcés Pérez in the back.

Parts of the incident were captured by a body camera, according to the DOJ, but only still images have been released to the public so far. Garcés Pérez disputes the government’s account, stating that a black SUV came out of nowhere and tried to hit his car while he was in the middle of a food delivery.

Garcés Pérez said that he thought the SUV was an aggressive driver and tried to drive away, only for the SUV to ram his car and turn on its police lights after the crash. He was then shot after the car was stopped, according to The New York Times.

Since the incident, Garcés Pérez’s lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch said that he has languished in ICE’s custody without adequate medical care, having spent just three hours in a hospital before being taken into ICE’s detention center in Pearsall, Texas without being able to see his wife. A spokesperson for Lincoln-Goldfinch said in a statement Tuesday that the bullet is still lodged in Garcés Pérez’s body even after nearly nine days.

“Rather than provide the life saving medical care he needs, D.H.S. and the government are playing games with his life,” the statement said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is doing everything he can to clear the deck of battle-tested leaders as he prepares to drag President Donald Trump’s supposedly “six-week war” into its eighth month.

Hegseth is plotting to cut 20 percent of the Pentagon’s slots for admirals and generals, two officials told The Hill Tuesday. The secretary will formally announce the reductions during his State of the Force address in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday.

Hegseth has already overseen a vast reduction in the number of top-ranking military personnel. At the time of his confirmation, there were 10 four-star generals on active duty. Now there are just five—the smallest number to lead the service in years.

In May, Hegseth signed an order directing the U.S. military to slash the number of active-duty four-star generals, as well as general and flag officers, by 10 percent, and reduce the number of general officers in the National Guard by a minimum of 20 percent. At the time, Hegseth claimed the “Less Generals, More GIs” policy would allow for a leaner military structure, but provided no guidance for how these cuts ought to actually be made.  

In April, Hegseth fired Army chief of staff General Randy George, and forced out at least three senior officers who were believed to be in the running to be George’s replacement. All in all, Hegseth has forced out at least half a dozen senior officers, undermining military readiness in the ongoing campaign in the Middle East. 

Hegseth’s leadership has come under increased scrutiny amid mounting reports that he concealed casualties among U.S. service members, depleted the U.S. military weapons stockpile, directed massive, unchecked government spending, and allowed horrific conditions aboard long-deployed U.S. ships that led to a number of attempted suicides. 

There’s also the matters of killing school children and nearly starting World War III—both tied to his overreliance on artificial intelligence.

Earlier this month, the House announced that it would end its voting session early in order to avoid an impeachment vote on Hegseth. The vote won’t take place until after the midterm elections, but a number of Senate Democrats have already signaled that supporting an impeachment vote against the secretary would be a worthwhile use of political capital, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday. 

The Supreme Court has decided that the Trump administration can resume deporting immigrants to countries other than their place of origin.

The nation’s highest judiciary on Tuesday paused a lower court ruling that blocked the government from deporting people to locations they had no relation to without due process. The decision came by way of an emergency ruling that did not include a vote count.

The Supreme Court is expected to pick the issue back up again in December when it will hear oral arguments. A final ruling is expected next year.

This is a developing story.

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Inside Washington

Katie Hobbs is holding the line in Arizona. Now, she’s under attack.

With midterms that could shift control of Congress rapidly approaching, the gubernatorial election in Arizona might not be high on the average Democrat’s radar. But incumbent Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs is facing a potentially hard race in a state Democrats don’t want to lose. 

Hobbs is “the person who is keeping the legislature at bay,” explained Thomas Volgy, a professor at the University of Arizona and the former mayor of Tucson. The governor’s veto power is currently the last line of defense against right-wing legislation passed by the Republican-controlled state Senate and House of Representatives. On one Friday in late June, for example, Hobbs vetoed 88 bills, including a bill that would have banned the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures in hiring and another that would allow people who detransition to sue the medical providers who aided in their gender transition care. As of mid-July, Hobbs had signed 993 bills into law and vetoed 541 since assuming office. “Her responsibility as a Democratic governor is to make sure the legislature does no harm,” Volgy added.

Since she took office in 2023, Hobbs has also presided over a number of crucial policy fights, and is making the pitch that she needs four more years to see them through. 

“In my second term, I will continue to prioritize lowering costs, creating good-paying jobs, protecting water, and investing in public education,” Hobbs wrote in a statement to The New Republic. “I want to put Prop 123 on the ballot to secure much-needed support for Arizona’s public schools without raising taxes, while continuing to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse in the ESA program,” she said, referring to a proposition to raise money for public education and the state’s “Empowerment Scholarship Account,” or ESA program, which is a school choice funding program.

Arizona’s ESA program was established in 2011 and became universal in 2022, giving students public funding to spend on private education. The program is, unsurprisingly, controversial among state Democrats. “Enacting meaningful reform to Arizona’s out-of-control ESA program is critical,” said Stacy Pearson, a state Democratic strategist and co-founder of Lumen Strategies. “We’ve got districts across the state closing public schools” because state funds are used for the ESA program instead.

Arizona is one of seven states in the Colorado River Basin. The next negotiations for water rights in the region will take place in 2028. The governor plays an active role in those negotiations, directs the state Department of Water Resources, and, of course, holds veto power over legislation that could threaten the state’s water supply. As governor, Hobbs has focused on conserving the state’s groundwater resources, even if it means blocking housing development in some cases. Early in her term, she canceled the land leases of a Saudi Arabian farming company, Fondomonte, which her administration said was excessively pumping groundwater to grow alfalfa. While Hobbs has focused on conservation, Biggs is a proponent of desalination efforts, which Hobbs hasn’t focused on as governor. 

Polling throughout the summer showed Hobbs leading her opponent, Representative Andy Biggs. Some of those leads were more significant than others: In a mid-August poll, she was up 15 points, while a different poll conducted at the same time showed her only up two points. But public polling has been limited since mid-August, and there was a significant development at the end of that month.

Hobbs, who only won her 2022 election by some 18,000 votes, has been plagued by an investigation into alleged pay-to-play scandal: a foster care provider who donated hundreds of thousands to her campaign, and was subsequently awarded a rate increase by the state. On August 21 this year, the state attorney general announced that there was no evidence that Hobbs broke the law, and declined to prosecute her. Though the attorney general’s investigation absolved Hobbs of any blame, Republican-aligned offices and groups like the auditor general’s office are conducting their own reviews. Republicans in the state house hired a Trump-aligned attorney to investigate Hobbs, and Republican lawmakers issued subpoenas to Hobbs, the attorney general, and others in mid-September. (One of those lawmakers, State Senator Jake Hoffman, stepped down from leading the investigation after The Arizona Republic raised questions about over $1 million received by his political consulting businesses to help elect Biggs.)

Hobbs’s campaign has argued that Republicans are using the now-closed investigation to smear Hobbs ahead of the election. “With just 27 days until early voting begins, it’s no surprise partisan extremists are launching desperate political stunts,” Michael Beyer, Hobbs’s communications director, wrote recently in response to attacks by Biggs.

Volgy doesn’t think the investigation into Hobbs is the biggest factor in this race. “The driving force behind this election is Donald Trump, and he’s doing very badly in the state,” he said, citing the Iran war and rising costs. President Trump has a net approval rating of -19 points in the state, an all-time low for the president.

“Getting reelected in a red state is going to give her an opportunity,” Pearson said, to do more of what she’s already been doing. “To just shut the system down until meaningful reform is on her desk.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

President Trump’s announcement on Monday of a plan to build a $15 billion steel mill in eastern Iowa comes amid increasingly bad numbers for him in that state. Last week, a Marist University poll not only found Democrat Josh Turek up eight points against Ashley Hinson in Iowa’s Senate race—it also found that 43 percent of respondents “say their congressional vote is mostly a vote against President Trump.” The same poll also found Democrat Rob Sand up a shocking 12 points against Republican Zach Lahn in the gubernatorial race. Voters disapproved of Trump 58 percent to 41 percent.  

News outlets on Monday widely gestured to the midterm context in reporting the steel mill news. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who’s currently either neck and neck with or slightly trailing Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan in Iowa’s 1st congressional district, announced mid-Monday that she’d be joining Trump for the announcement event—and added that the steel mill would be located in Lee County (part of her district). The Des Moines Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel on Monday pointed readers to prior coverage “about a mysterious company buying up land in Lee County,” as well as a reported “special legislative session to address a tax incentive package for this deal,” explicitly pitched as coming “*before* the midterms.”  

Whether this gambit will pay off amid voter frustration over a lot of other problems, though, remains to be seen. The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports Hinson taking heat from voters frustrated over high fuel prices and Trump’s war on Iran. Meanwhile, Trump is continuing his vendetta against the Des Moines Register over a poll published shortly before the 2024 presidential election. After a judge threw out Trump’s lawsuit against the Register last week, a member of the president’s legal team told Politico that they’d be taking the case to the Iowa Supreme Court.

Elsewhere:

• The Guardian reports shocking findings from a Center for Biological Diversity review of federal records: Almost 25 percent of continental U.S. rivers contain dangerous levels of the herbicide atrazine, a potent hormone disruptor known to “chemically castrate” frogs, which can damage human reproductive systems as well as numerous other organs. (Unsurprisingly, it’s especially hazardous to developing fetuses and children.) Read Tom Perkins’s full report for more on how atrazine became so widely used in the U.S., despite being banned in dozens of other countries.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Tuesday at noon, New America hosts “Power at the Polls: Confronting Basic Barriers to Accessible Democracy,” a virtual discussion about factors jeopardizing voting rights for Americans with disabilities. Speakers will include Rebecca Cokley, Mia Ives-Rublee, Dom Kelly, Lee Drutman, Asim Dietrich, and Sydney Saubestre. 

Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution hosts a forum on “meeting long-term care needs for an aging United States.” Panelists will include Maggie Elehwany of Argentum, Nicole Howell from the National Council on Aging, Haeyoung Yoon of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Stanford economics professor Neale Mahoney, University Hospital CEO Carole Johnson, the Urban Institute’s Tisamarie Sherry, Jonathan Cohn of The Bulwark, and Brookings’s Aviva Aron-Dine and Tara Watson.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Lindsay Owens, president and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative

Q: How did your new book come about?

A: Groundwork has worked hard to expose how corporations combine their pricing power with new technologies to nickel and dime consumers, and my new book is really the culmination of that work. Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—and What That Means for Your Wallet is about the dizzying array of high-tech tricks, traps, and grifts that companies now use to rip us off. Price gougers are coming for almost every line in your household budget.
Q: What is the most difficult thing about the work you’re doing?
A: One of the things I learned while writing the book is that these manipulative pricing tactics are lurking everywhere. Pricing is now a highly engineered science, and there is a cottage industry of consultants, pricing advisers, and AI pricing startups out there to help companies figure out how to empty your wallet. These practices are often opaque; it’s quite difficult for veteran researchers—let alone everyday shoppers—to uncover them. But when consumers see something fishy (for example, if two friends realize they are getting charged different prices for the exact same concert ticket), they should speak up. You can help researchers and regulators investigate and crack down on these insidious practices.
Q: What was your biggest success in the last year or two?
A: Last year, Groundwork teamed up with Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union to expose the secret experiments Instacart was running on families buying their weekly groceries. It sparked a media frenzy, massive consumer backlash, and even an FTC probe. Just two weeks later, Instacart reversed course and shut down its pricing lab. This summer, I’ve been blowing the whistle—in the media and testifying on Capitol Hill—on Walmart’s use of AI-powered pricing and shopping technologies, like their profitable new chatbot, Sparky. Just a few days ago, the CEO wrote a letter to shoppers backtracking on these wildly unpopular practices. Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant.
Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?
A: The first one is personal: my three-year-old son, Alfie. It’s hard to despair about the state of the world when you look through the eyes of a boundlessly energetic, curious, and clever kiddo. I’m also motivated and inspired every day by my colleagues at Groundwork. I’ve long said we are an organization that punches way above its weight (regularly bringing Fortune 500 companies to heel!), and that’s because of the hard work and brilliance of the team. Stay tuned: We have plenty more in store in the months ahead.
Interview by Monica Potts

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

On this day in 1962, President Kennedy authorized the use of federal troops to integrate what public university? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

It turns out that President Trump took money for his self-adulating ads from the Department of Homeland Security. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House paid for multiple pro-Trump ads specifically with money from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 

The ads in question praise the president and highlight claims of his achievements in office. One of them plays the JMSN song “Love Me” as President Trump declares “America will never be a communist country.” Another seemed to copy a 2024 campaign video, where a black-and-white Trump is walking while his voice talks about “the final battle.” Another shows pictures of Mount Rushmore while Trump narrates “the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”   

Trump reportedly was involved in the ads’ creation and pushed for them himself. They include a “paid for by the U.S. government” disclaimer, which would seem to violate federal laws such as the Hatch Act against the executive branch promoting political causes. The Trump administration claims they are public service announcements. 

In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday, Democratic Senators Patty Murray and Chris Murphy said that “using government funding to create or air political ads like the ones that have been running over the last few days is illegal and a shockingly corrupt misuse of taxpayer dollars.” They reported that Trump has set aside $20 million of DHS funds for the ads.

“The American people deserve answers about how this president is literally stealing their tax dollars to air campaign ads celebrating himself—while doing nothing to help them afford health care or housing. These ads need to immediately come off the air, taxpayers need to be paid back for this theft, and everyone responsible needs to be held accountable for this corrupt and illegal propaganda,” the senators wrote. 

The ads have aired almost 90 times across national television as of Sunday on networks including MS NOW, CBS, Fox, and Newsmax, costing an estimated $337,000. They’ve also aired on local stations 2,311 times at an estimated cost of $1.4 million. 

“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” a White House spokesperson said last week. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”

The State Department offered a government contract to Oxygen Forensics even after federal officials were made aware of the company’s ties to Moscow.

Last week, the Justice Department announced that Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber (an American) and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They were also accused of orchestrating a scheme to conceal the company’s Russian ownership from the federal agencies to which they supplied phone hacking software.

The government knew of this by at least August 28, when Oxygen Forensics sued a former employee-turned-whistleblower, Max Weissberg, for making the plot public. Nonetheless, the State Department agreed to a $50,000 contract with Oxygen Forensics that same day, according to federal procurement data obtained by PunchUp.

Reiber advertised that his company, which provides forensic and archival services for electronic data, exclusively sold American-made software and had no foreign ownership.

Yet five Russian nationals, including Davydov, allegedly owned and controlled Oxygen Forensics through a holding company based in Cyprus, according to a criminal complaint released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. The company’s software, too, was Russian, the complaint alleged.

Several executive agencies were affected by the scheme: the Defense Department and components of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Secret Service, the National Computer Forensics Institute, Homeland Security Investigations, and the DHS Office of Inspector General, according to the complaint. But the federal procurement data would suggest that the State Departmnet—as well as the U.S. embassy in Zagreb, Croatia, that awarded the contract—could also have been compromised.

The Virginia-based group allegedly concealed its true ownership after the U.S. imposed additional sanctions on Russia in early 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine. Months later, Reiber—of Boise, Idaho—was appointed the company’s CEO, president, and chairman of the board, while mentions of Russian ownership were stripped from the company’s public filings, according to the complaint.

Details released in the affidavit suggest that Reiber was well aware of the conspiracy. In November 2023, Reiber wrote to Davydov and the other alleged Russian accomplices after a reporter asked about Oxygen Forensics’ connection to a Russian company. Reiber noted at the time that the reporting “could destroy” a pending contract with the National Computer Forensics Institute, and that the “current existence of this company hangs in the balance,” according to the criminal complaint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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