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Inside Washington

Virginia’s 5th congressional district is rural, evangelical, and red. But, in a testament to how difficult 2026 is for Republicans, Democrat Tom Perriello just might have a fighting chance.

“It is somewhat surprising that, at least based on the polls, the Democratic candidate is polling so well,” said Alex Keena, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. “And then on the other hand, it’s probably not surprising at all, given what’s going on in this cycle.”

Farming is a cornerstone of the local economy, and the district is also home to Liberty University. Since the district’s new lines were drawn in the 2020 redistricting process, Democrats haven’t considered it a particularly viable target. President Donald Trump won the district by 12 points in 2024, and Republican incumbent John McGuire defeated his Democratic opponent by 15 points. Even in 2025, which was considered a good year for Virginia Democrats, Governor Abigail Spanberger received just over 46 percent of the vote in the district.

But, as Keena suggested, things are different in 2026. McGuire was leading Perriello 51 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in a recent Washington Post–Schar School poll, with a 4.6 percent margin of error. Though that still puts the Republican in the lead, experts say it’s a slimmer margin than expected, and Perriello has a chance. Like voters in the rest of the country, residents of Virginia’s 5th district are feeling the knock-on effects of Trump’s war in Iran. The district is a mix of blue college towns and red farmland, and those farmers have been hit hard by the increasing costs of fertilizer, gas, and other goods.

Trump helped boost McGuire’s campaign in 2024 as a form of revenge against Representative Bob Good, the district’s then-representative. Good, a staunch conservative and former chair of the Freedom Caucus, supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primary, drawing Trump’s ire. 

The decision to replace Good in 2024 is part of why Perriello has a chance now, Keena said. “Members of Congress are most vulnerable in that first reelection cycle,” he explained. Good could have stayed in office, building a reputation for himself among constituents. Instead, McGuire is a newcomer and comparatively unfamiliar to voters in the district. “This is kind of like the chickens coming home to roost for a president who likes to make erratic decisions and likes to use his endorsements to air grievances and punish people,” he said.

Perriello, on the other hand, has a reputation within the district. He represented the 5th district from 2009 to 2011. The district was a bit different then, before the most recent round of redistricting, but experts say he’s still a known entity in the area. He’s been campaigning hard: On Monday, he campaigned for more than 24 hours straight in what he dubs, “24 Hours of Tom.”

“The original idea was, I knew that people were working a double shift to support their own families. I wanted them to believe I’d work a double shift for them in Congress, and that became this idea of the 24 hours of campaigning,” Perriello told The New Republic on Wednesday. In the 26 hours that he campaigned, he hit every county in the district. “We want to make it clear that I am running to represent every part of this district, not just the blue areas.” During the early morning hours, Perriello said, he rode along with Charlottesville police, met with emergency responders, and joined farmers who were getting to work at 4 a.m. He also met with truckers refueling at gas stations; one explained that it cost $3,000 to fill up his tank. The cost of living crisis, Perriello said, makes voters “particularly angry because these were man-made problems, and those men are Donald Trump and John McGuire.”

Data centers have, unsurprisingly, become a key issue in the race. Virginia has the country’s highest concentration of data centers, and it is also the proposed home of the Valley Link Transmission Line, a high-voltage electric line that would traverse 115 miles across the state. Perriello has made data centers, AI concerns, and utility costs a centerpiece of his campaign and hopes it will pay off with voters who see data centers as a physical manifestation of their fears around AI and affordability. “The voters are way ahead of the political parties on AI,” he said. “You have issues like the Valley Link Transmission Line and data centers that are uniting people across very different kinds of politics.”

Perriello said that communities should be the ones to decide whether companies can build them in their backyards. “Where communities don’t want data centers, we should help them fight the data centers. And where communities want them, we should fight to get them the best possible deal,” he said. “But it is really hard to find communities that want them.” McGuire, meanwhile, has said that communities should decide whether a data center is built, but that the U.S. must beat China in the fight for AI dominance.

Experts who spoke to The New Republic emphasized that, despite the favorable political circumstances, the odds are still in Republicans’ favor in Virginia’s 5th district. But there’s a larger story at play. “Democrats can win the House without Virginia five,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington. But “the fact that Virginia five is increasingly seen as competitive speaks to what a challenging environment Republicans are facing this fall.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The Minnesota Star Tribune’s Allison Kite and Briana Bierschbach pen a fascinating report on the shifting politics of northeastern Minnesota, which used to offer strong support to the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party but “has become harder for Democrats to hold” and could be key to Republicans gaining the upper hand in the state’s tightly balanced legislature. Republican candidates are playing up issues like immigration and fraud, while Democrats such as state senator Grant Hauschild—looking to defend himself from a second-time challenge from Republican Andrea Zupancich—are “betting that health care and childcare will matter to voters, too.” Democrat Aaron Schweiger, currently running against sitting state Representative Natalie Zeleznikar, similarly “said Trump has effectively pulled rural voters away from Democrats based largely on ‘cultural issues,’” and material ones could push them back into the blue. Meanwhile, everyone’s trying to claim the high ground on data centers.

New York’s 1st congressional district candidate Chris Gallant gives The New York Times an interview for the ages: “‘I mean, all my friends know I’m kinky’ as hell, he said, using a saltier word. ‘I make Christian Grey look like amateur hour.’” Times reporter Jacob Bernstein was accompanying the Democrat to the shooting range and had asked him about the photos that the New York Post publicized last month, from when Gallant posed for a “San Francisco fetish brand” in 2010. Gallant initially called it a “coordinated political hit” but has opted to own the vibe.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Thursday at 1 p.m., the Center for American Progress will hold an online discussion with Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar, authors of the recent book The Everywhere Millionaire, about how business ownership became the “main path to wealth in America, and what that means for the future of tax policy and the American Dream.” New York University professor Lily Batchelder and Amy Hanauer of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy will also join the discussion, which will be moderated by Corey Husak, with introductory remarks from Emily Gee.

A new poll from Data for Progress finds 56 percent of likely voters think “the government should invest more” in public housing, with strong majorities backing extreme weather resilience, energy efficiency, and clean water and air as factors to be considered in constructing such housing. The organization concludes that voters generally support the components of the so-called “Green New Deal” for public housing—just not necessarily by that name.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Destroying Los Angeles is a “small price to pay”?

Watch TNR’s Edith Olmsted unpack the speech in which Trump seemed to suggest it would be okay for Iran to nuke southern California.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

Who was the United States of America’s first ambassador to France? He’s a pretty famous guy.

(Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO

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

Lisa Su, president and CEO, Advanced Micro Devices

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

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

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

Michael Dell, Dell Technologies founder, chair, and CEO 

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

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The president is making an enemy out of Fox News.

The conservative media behemoth publicly defended its reporting this week, rebuking a wave of Republican backlash that began after host Martha MacCallum interviewed Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in August.

“Someone didn’t necessarily like that,” Fox News Media President Jay Wallace told Axios Thursday, seemingly referring to Donald Trump. “But that’s what we do.”

For years, Fox News blurred the line between legitimate news coverage and conservative entertainment. The network veered towards sycophancy once Trump entered office the first time, offering buddy-buddy interviews to the presidential Cabinet while dampening the reach of critical stories such as the Epstein files. (Fox News mentioned the prolific child sex trafficker hundreds of times fewer than its major broadcast competitors.)

But apparently, Republicans got too comfortable with Fox’s bent knee. Once network executives decided to air interviews with Democratic competitors—such as El-Sayed—the floodgates opened.

First, the outcry was private. White House aides put in calls to the network, complaining that Fox’s angle on El-Sayed would only help him in the tight Michigan race.

But the fury bubbled to the public sphere this week, when Trump decided to take the issue to Truth Social.

“FoxNews spends more time covering the Jihadist and Dumocrat candidates than they do the good old fashioned Republicans, the people that have saved America, and are making it great again,” Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday.

Trump further claimed that MacCallum had offered El-Sayed a “softball interview.”

“She never interviews me like that. They don’t show my record breaking Rallies the morning after, but others do, and that’s what MAGA is watching. Fox is promoting the Dumocrats, not the Republicans and MAGA. They have totally lost their way!” he added.

Republican strategists also chimed in. Jason Roe, a Michigan-based GOP operative, told Axios that the network was doing El-Sayed a “favor.”

“It’s only helping him reach center-right voters,” Roe said. “But they are in business to make money, and he attracts eyeballs.”

In another post Wednesday evening, Trump went full Islamophobe, referring to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” (the candidate’s full first name is Abdulrahman) and deriding him as a “Terrorist Sympathizer.”

El-Sayed responded to the attack Thursday morning, arguing that Trump is “not just attacking me.”

“He’s attacking all of us. He thinks so low of us. He thinks he can use my name and my faith to distract us from the suffering his policies are inflicting on us at the pump, at the grocery store, and at the doctor’s office. He thinks we don’t know any better,” El-Sayed wrote on X. “It’s time for change.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly launched a 45-day immigration crackdown in California ahead of the midterm elections, instructing its officers to “go after anybody.”

The so-called “Operation Safe California” has not been formally announced yet, but two sources told the Washington Examiner Wednesday that operations have been underway for several days.

One source told the outlet that officers were “told to go after anybody, they can pick up anybody.”

The Examiner suggested that means that federal agents will target any undocumented immigrants, not just people with criminal records. There is no evidence to suggest that ICE has ever been so discerning.

News of this secret operation comes as early voting began this week in California, which has been a consistent target for punishment by the Trump administration. Voting rights groups cited an ICE detention that took place in Santa Maria, California, on Monday in the same area that voters had to pass through to reach a ballot drop box.

This latest surge of ICE activity comes more than a year after federal agents descended on Los Angeles in June 2025, which led to widespread protests and violent encounters with law enforcement. Of the hundreds of people detained as part of those raids, seven in 10 people had no criminal convictions.

A second source told the Examiner that “management want numbers.” Last year, White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller instructed ICE to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day, a demand that has overwhelmed the agency and resulted in inhumane and degrading detention practices. Now it seems, the Trump administration plans to turn up the temperature.

American diplomats are supposed to represent the interests of the U.S. above everything else.

David Milstein, an aide to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, was running cover for the Israeli government, suppressing reports critical of Israeli actions, The New York Times reports. Milstein, according to several unnamed sources, quashed reports from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem documenting Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank—including against Americans.

Milstein sent a cable from the embassy to Washington praising Israel for cracking down on Israeli settler violence, when in reality, embassy staff had drafted a report saying that the Israeli government wasn’t taking action. After Congress raised concerns about how Israeli authorities and settlers have killed nine American citizens, Milstein suppressed another embassy report, hindering lawmakers from investigating further.

Milstein also demanded any communications from the embassy’s section on Palestinian affairs go through him. This led to the embassy’s cables dropping from several per week to only a few per month, sources told the Times. They said that this kind of intervention is unprecedented for the embassy, and is preventing the U.S. government from getting accurate information about Israel from diplomatic channels.

Trump has rarely criticized Israel or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his second term as president, and he chose to appoint Huckabee, a Christian Zionist and staunch supporter of Israel, as ambassador. It’s not clear if Milstein’s actions have Huckabee’s blessing, but human rights groups and U.S. allies have raised concerns about all of these issues.

Last month, Canada, France, and the U.K. announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That’s unlikely to happen in the U.S. anytime soon—and in fact the U.S. has threatened tariffs in response to the sanctions—but one would still expect U.S. diplomats to accurately document what is happening where they are stationed. In the case of Israel, however, the truth is actively being hidden.

President Donald Trump did nothing as one of his rallygoers attacked a peaceful protester.

Trump struggled to get through his address at a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, Wednesday night as his remarks were repeatedly interrupted by at least seven separate protesters.

As one demonstrator made his way out of the arena through the jeering crowd, a rallygoer in a red hat seized the protester’s shirt and yanked his hair, pulling him to the floor.

Other rallygoers appeared to intervene—but not the president of the United States. Instead, he basked in the roar of an angry crowd, wandering aimlessly around the stage. “Let me ask you a question, is there anything like a Trump rally? Is there anything like it?” Trump asked, smiling broadly.

In a separate incident, a rallygoer wearing a white cowboy hat stalked after two protesters as they were directed out of the arena. The rallygoer smacked one of the protesters’ baseball hats off and followed them threateningly, pumping his fists. He even appeared to lunge or kick one of the protesters, before being held back by a security officer.

Trump’s unwillingness to condemn his supporters’ violence (and in many cases, his decision to encourage it) is obviously nothing new. But the failure to address violence that unfolds before his own eyes is still shameful behavior from any leader—let alone the president of the United States.

Speaking at the rally, the president told demonstrators to “get the hell out of here,” and claimed they were “paid by enemies of our nation.” After the sixth interruption, Trump tried to laugh it off. “You know, I never talk about looks of a person, but those are really bad looking people,” Trump said.

More audio of Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton has leaked, this time featuring the embattled lawmaker telling people depending on federal benefits programs to “suck it up” and prepare for cuts.

“The growing out of this is part of the solution, and making some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending—you’re gonna have to do it,” Paxton said at the same donor meeting that three other leaks have sprouted from, as first reported by The Texas Tribune.

“There is no solution. That’s just the reality. We have to suck it up,” he continued. “From Republican presidents to Democrats, we’ve been spending like crazy. And no one seems to care. And it’s gonna bankrupt us.”

Just about everything Paxton has said behind closed doors suggests that he is both out of step with President Trump and out of touch with the average Texas voter.

“At this point I wouldn’t be totally surprised if the next leak from this fundraiser is: ‘Honestly, you should probably just vote for Talarico,’” joked liberal podcaster Jon Favreau.

In previous leaks from the meeting last month, Paxton called Trump a drag on his campaign and said Trump’s war on Iran was raising prices and making it harder for him to campaign. Aside from the embarrassing amount of leaks, Paxton sounds like more of a “Never Trump” Republican rather than a willing Trump loyalist, as he portrayed himself during the primary election. This all comes as his long-awaited showdown with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico draws nearer, with Talarico leading most polls by a small margin.

NEW @TexasTribune: Ken Paxton privately suggested he'd support cutting federal benefit programs, per new leaked audio. Asked about reducing the deficit, he said: “Making some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending - you're gonna have to do it." "We have to suck it up." https://t.co/mxmb45Me2o

— Kayla Guo (@kaylaguo_) October 8, 2026

When Donald Trump gives, he expects something in return.

The revelation came amid an attack Wednesday night against Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, who Trump apparently believed should have become a Republican after he received a presidential pardon last year.

Speaking at a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, Trump insisted that he never expects quid pro quos when it comes to presidential pardons. But he then proved that untrue minutes later.

“I made no deal,” Trump declared, recalling his exchange with Cuellar. “I didn’t say, ‘Oh, I’ll give you the pardons if you turn Republican.’ I didn’t say that. No, I could have done that very easily but—where a crooked politician would have done that.”

“But I thought there would be a good chance that Cuellar might say, ‘Wow, he did something really wonderful, you know, somebody has a heart.’”

The president then suggested Cuellar had been villainized by the Democratic Party and that he would have been welcomed into the Republican Party with open arms “if we asked.”

Just moments later, Trump mused about how Cuellar’s daughters had “begged” the president to pardon their father, and wished that they had used the “same level of charm to convince their mother and father to do the right thing.”

“I guess I expected maybe he wouldn’t run, or maybe he’d run maybe as a Republican, I don’t know,” Trump said.

Trump had shared similar thoughts on Truth Social hours prior when endorsing Cuellar’s opponent. The president accused Cuellar of a “tremendous act of disloyalty” and said Cuellar was an “extremely ungrateful person.”

“Henry Cuellar is a LOSER who, right now, should be serving a long-term jail sentence with his wife in a top level penitentiary,” Trump added.

The FBI raided Cuellar’s home and office in 2022 as part of a federal probe into the Texas Democrat’s ties to Azerbaijan. Cuellar and his wife faced a dozen charges of bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy—including allegations that they improperly accepted $600,000 in bribes from the central Asian country—before Trump intervened. At the time, Trump chalked up the charges to an improper intervention by the Biden administration, suggesting that his predecessor had weaponized the legal system to punish Cuellar for criticizing America’s immigration processes.

President Donald Trump clearly gets a kick out of imagining Iran destroying American cities.

Speaking at a rally in San Antonio Wednesday night, Trump doubled down on the outlandish fallacy that anyone complaining about high gas prices should consider the alternative: that Iran could strike Los Angeles or San Diego.

“But you wanna see trauma? You wanna see problems? And I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. Let them hit—you wanna see a horror show, you wanna see problems? Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles. And you wanna see some bad things happen. You wanna see a country that would be in freefall,” Trump said. “We’re not gonna let that happen. We protect our cities, we protect our country.”

Trump made a similar remark at a rally in Nebraska earlier this week, where he said, “They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s—this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.”

Some viewers believed that Trump had issued an invitation to Iran to destroy two American cities. The rally crowd even burst into cheers when the president evoked the imminent destruction of California, a consistent target of his administration. But Trump’s team insisted that his comment was simply taken out of context: His “let them” comment was a warning of what could happen if the United States did not intervene, and that the “small price to pay” referred to high prices of goods and services.

“He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped,” White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote on X.

Trump’s decision to revisit his controversial comment clarifies everything: clearly he likes to evoke the destruction of these blue cities in order to illustrate his nonsensical point about high gas prices to crowds in red states. His dramatics are just another way to sidestep blame for high prices.

It’s worth noting that Trump’s fallacy is a false one. Multiple former Trump administration officials have contradicted the president’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program presented any imminent threat to national security. Trump himself claimed earlier this week that Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated in June 2025, a full eight months before he ordered attacks in March 2026.

Kimberly Guilfoyle begged a donor to send her $100,000 without leaving a trace as part of her pay-to-play grift—in the midst of her confirmation process last year to become U.S. ambassador to Greece.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Guilfoyle urged Trump donor and former congressional candidate Eric Deters to send her hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in exchange she’d make sure the administration took special care of Deters and his personal tax issues. Guilfoyle is also the former wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom and ex-fiance of Donald Trump Jr.

“You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express, that’s all that will show,” Guilfoyle wrote to Deters on July 3, 2025. “Please. And I have you down as one of my special guests for my hearing in DC on Wednesday.... I can get you in for a meeting on the matter we discussed please get back to me ASAP.”

“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she said, referring to the payment. Guilfoyle was confirmed as ambassador just months later in September.

Deters claimed that while he and Guilfoyle exchanged texts and promises for months (“I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” she told him at one point), he never sent her any money.

Deters is the same former Kentucky GOP gubernatorial candidate who hosts the new defunct Freedom Fest in Kentucky. Guilfoyle was one of the event’s earliest headliners, as Deters paid her $300,000 to speak there starting in 2020. In 2024, Deters sought out Guilfoyle’s help with an extradition request for Abubakar Atiq Durrani, an Ohio doctor who fled to Pakistan after he was charged with defrauding insurers with unnecessary spinal surgeries on kids. Deters, who was representing the families of the children, ran into a problem with Durrani’s malpractice insurer MedPro, which held it wasn’t liable for his actions. MedProinstead sued Deters for “a calculated scheme to extract payments” from the company, “at first through abusive litigation, and by ultimately outright extortion through threats of violence and murder and by blackmail against the company’s CEO.” The accusations—which Deters denies—led him to reach out to Guilfoyle, even telling her he’d pay her $1 million to get him a spot on Tucker Carlson’s show to draw attention to his situation.

Guilfoyle and Deters began to speak more frequently after her nomination as ambassador.

“Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” Guilfoyle wrote in one message to Deters. It’s really dangerous … and you could simply just call me on signal.” She even chastised him for speaking to a producer on her podcast about their deal, saying, “it’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money.... Do not say we have any arrangement. What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Deters claims he didn’t end up making any payments to Guilfoyle and had “not received one favor.”

Guilfoyle’s attorneys deny that the messages between her and Deters are legitimate, and claim that if anything he owed her speaking fees from his defunct Freedom Fest. Deters denies that.

This is a massive ethics question that the administration will likely try its hardest to ignore, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio did before leaving for Greece.

“I’m not going to comment,” he told reporters.