The New Republic

The Trump administration has detained more than 500 U.S. citizens since it began its mass deportation initiative, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Trump officials have insisted that U.S. citizens are not at risk under the president’s agenda. “We have said it a million times: ICE does NOT arrest or deport U.S. citizens,” former DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement last October.

But that was a lie. A ProPublica story published Tuesday tracked every instance of an immigration agent holding a U.S. citizen during the second Trump administration.

They found 506 such cases, including at least 70 children and teenagers, and more than 100 Americans who were detained after federal agents questioned their citizenship status—nearly all of whom were people of color. ProPublica acknowledged that this total is likely an undercount.

At least 63 Americans were detained while they were recording and documenting their arrest, and 36 were refused the right to contact their lawyers or family for more than a day. Roughly a dozen U.S. citizens were deported, according to the report. Most of them were children.

“Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed,” ProPublica noted.

The nonprofit newsroom’s findings call into question practically every public assurance DHS has made. Instead, it’s become increasingly clear that federal immigration agents have run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution as they face mounting pressure from the Oval Office and White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to deport as many people as possible.

Miller has framed immigration as an “invasion.” He has advocated to end habeas corpus for immigrants, promoted large-scale raids at workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods, threatened the futures of immigrants who do not “self-deport,” and encouraged the White House to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Miller was fundamental in crafting some of the more draconian policies of Donald Trump’s first term, including separating families at the border, terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the executive orders that amounted to Trump’s Muslim ban.

In May 2025, Miller issued another tyrannical order to his ICE underlings: a minimum quota of 3,000 arrests per day. “President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day,” Miller told Fox News at the time.

But that goal proved unsustainable, particularly after reports began to circulate that ICE agents had never been so miserable. Agents complained that the massive quota pushed them to detain noncriminal immigrants. The Justice Department walked back Miller’s directive in August that year, though even the loosened reins didn’t stop agents from arresting dozens of citizens.

During Operation Midway Blitz in September 2025, DHS pledged that ICE had “significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed,” noting that there would be “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens.” Something entirely different happened on the ground: at the height of the federal encroachment, agents detained more than 120 citizens across the state, according to the ProPublica report.

Darius Reeves, who ran ICE offices around the East Coast for roughly eight years before he retired in 2025, told ProPublica that he had “never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years.”

“It’s an embarrassment,” Reeves said.

The White House pressured the FBI to investigate anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles in violation of the Constitution, a whistleblower alleges.

A former supervisory intelligence analyst in the bureau’s field office in Los Angeles, Jill Fields, made a formal complaint to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Trump administration’s response to the protests around federal buildings last year, NBC News reports.

After President Trump saw a TikTok video of people using megaphones to alert the public about immigration agents, their legal rights, and the legal requirement of judicial warrants, he ordered FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate those organizers, according to the complaint. A person whose name was redacted in Fields’s letter told her that “the President wants this investigation.”

The protests came in response to stepped-up ICE activity across Los Angeles early last year. Fields’s complaint states that the FBI’s L.A. agents were pulled from active drug cartel cases to provide “optics” and “make a show for the president,” in the words of one of her supervisors.

When Fields spoke to a senior bureau official who dealt with privacy and civil liberties issues, that agent shared her concerns but said she planned to resign. Fields would later resign herself after she was removed from leading three programs, which she believes was retaliation. The FBI created a chilling effect within the workforce” and “signaled to other employees that raising constitutional or legal concerns could carry professional consequences,” Fields wrote.

The Justice Department called Fields’s complaint politically motivated and said that the Constitution does not protect violence, even though her letter only mentioned investigation of peaceful protesters.

“Under President Trump, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously uphold the First Amendment rights of all Americans and restore the rule of law,” a DOJ spokesperson told NBC News. “The DOJ and FBI have a responsibility to investigate any potential violations of federal law, and conspiracies to impede federal law enforcement and assaults on federal officers are against the law.”

Ultimately, Trump’s efforts to charge protesters in Los Angeles only resulted in dropped cases, and his decision to send federal troops to the city was shot down in federal court. But Trump wasn’t deterred from ramping up immigration enforcement in other cities across the country, such as Minneapolis and Chicago, and he continues to press on with his mass deportation efforts, defying the Constitution and federal courts every day. It remains to be seen if Democrats will put a stop to his policies if they take control of Congress after the midterms.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is taking action to strip 40 naturalized Americans of their citizenship.

According to a DOJ press release published Monday, the department has filed “denaturalization actions” against these individuals after they were accused of “serious offenses,” including “acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man.” The press release goes on to list the names, ages, countries of origin, and alleged crimes that each foreign-born citizen committed.

This move comes in the final months of a year that the president has spent doggedly pursuing his mass deportation agenda, which has included expanding denaturalization efforts so that no one born outside of the U.S.—not even those with legal status—feels safe. Reporting from The New York Times in April revealed that the Department of Justice was targeting 384 naturalized Americans from whom it wanted to revoke citizenship, an attempt to denaturalize Americans at a level not seen since the early nineteenth century. A DOJ official at the time told the Times that the department’s April effort was only “the first wave.”

“Today’s announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Monday. “From an individual convicted of espionage to others convicted of sexual offenses against minors, these defendants concealed critical facts from the U.S. government and represent serious criminal offenders.”

“Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate added in the release. “This administration will continue to pursue the largest denaturalization effort in department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship. Our message is clear: The United States will not tolerate deception in the naturalization process.”

This is indeed a massive escalation in the Trump administration’s denaturalization crusade. In comparison, an average of just 15 denaturalization cases were filed per year from 2017 to 2025.

The 40 foreign-born American citizens now in danger of losing their citizenship originally came from countries including Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, Haiti, Nepal, and Ghana. For the millions of naturalized Americans living in the U.S. today, the message is clear: Your citizenship may not be safe.

President Donald Trump called Natalie Harp a “perfect person” after showing her off to hundreds of rallygoers.

Trump invited a very special guest onstage at his rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, Monday night to deliver an executive order aimed at addressing the elevated fuel prices sparked by his war against Iran.

“So, tonight I’m going to sign a historic executive order to officially waive the off-road requirement and allow anyone to purchase tax-free red-dye diesel for any reason,” Trump said. “And I’d like to ask Natalie to come out. Natalie, come out! Bring it out here!”

As the president’s grinning blonde aide walked onto the stage, the crowd cheered wildly. After signing the document, Trump handed it back to Harp, patting her on the shoulder. As she departed the stage, the president looked back, just to ogle her one last time.

“She reminds me of, like, The Price is Right. ‘Thank you, Natalie! Come on!’ This perfect person comes up, hands it, walks up—we should go on television with this show, right?” Trump said.

Trump’s comment comparing Harp to a model only deepens assertions that the two have a wildly inappropriate working relationship. As Trump’s “human printer,” Harp has become the de facto gatekeeper to the president of the United States. In turn, Harp seems to have developed an unhealthy obsession with the president’s approval. Her own writing reveals that Harp views Trump as a kind of spiritual adviser, a father figure, and a Mr. Darcy-type romantic lead.

It was only two months ago that the White House raged over the speculation about Trump’s relationship to his 35-year-old assistant. Now the president doesn’t seem the least bit committed to putting those rumors to bed.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been on a real media blitz. But whether he’s doing damage control for his company’s recent scandals or participating in a new Luca Guadagnino biopic, it hasn’t seemed to improve his image. In an interview with Politico, Altman said that “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” referring to the large language models being developed by his company and its competitors.

What things does Sam Altman think are bad? He offered a few examples during a two-part interview with Vanity Fair published this week. Altman called it a “bad thing” for kids to be “glued to a touchscreen of some sort scrolling through brain rot short form video,” and said he would limit his own kids’ access to technology. People using LLMs to “create novel pathogens” would also be bad, he asserted. When Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci asked him to weigh in on a recent New York Times op-ed by journalist Laura Reiley—whose daughter committed suicide shortly after speaking to ChatGPT—an OpenAI publicist attempted to intervene. Altman eventually answered the question, and equivocated on whether it is good or bad for people experiencing a mental health crisis to turn to an LLM. “This is just like, this is new,” he said. “And the fact that someone in a moment of need that maybe can’t get help or isn’t willing to talk to a therapist can get some help here. Clearly people think there’s a version of this that is good. There are also clearly versions of it that are bad.”

As Altman has made clear in these and other interviews, however, he thinks it would be very bad for governments to regulate his industry in a way that suppresses innovation. He explained to Guiducci that he’s driven by the belief that putting powerful LLMs “in the hands of everyone and giving people a legitimate new superpower relative to I think what any of us could imagine a few years ago will do tremendously more good than bad.” The upshot here is that Altman would like the public to trust OpenAI to judge when the good is outweighing the bad. And although the “goods” of LLM development remain largely speculative—like curing cancer and granting wishes—the bads continue to pile up.

OpenAI faces a growing mountain of legal risks over incidents of its products hacking into government agencies around the world, not to mention providing advice to mass shooters, as Florida’s attorney general’s office has alleged. Nearly every company that’s developing large language models—OpenAI, Nvidia, SpaceX, Microsoft, and Google parent Alphabet—has contracted with a Pentagon that’s been proudly killing fishermen in Latin America, and that continues to wage an illegal war on Iran. While the self-styled good guys at Anthropic declined to work with the military several months back, the company hasn’t balked at building a predictive surveillance system to monitor activists. Silicon Valley executives have largely dismissed concerns that the data centers fueling their technologies threaten everything from local aquifers to electricity rates, and have seemed relatively unconcerned about the ways that LLM-generated slop is rapidly distorting people’s ability to think and reason independently.

The trouble with trusting AI companies to decide what’s good and what’s bad is that, like other CEOs, Altman and his colleagues have a financial interest in the answers to these moral questions. There are obvious commercial upsides for the executives in continuing to portray their companies (their “labs,” as they like to call them) as upstanding research entities, and mere stewards of a fundamentally mysterious, powerful, and inevitable technology. But they have just as much to gain from the public conversation about LLMs orbiting around the question of whether individual CEOs are good people. It doesn’t really matter one way or the other. They run large and powerful companies that sell products and have no legal obligation to the public good. Those companies appear to be committing crimes, which they could be tried for, using laws that already exist. As far off as real enforcement and regulation might seem, such laws are the only things that will keep the rest of us from being subject to their lousy ethics.

President Trump invited infamous election denier Tina Peters to the White House to discuss plans for the midterms.

Former Department of Justice official Ed Martin revealed the meeting to Eric Bolling on the conservative network Real America’s Voice Monday, saying that Trump had met with Peters about two hours earlier.

“Tina Peters, you know, from Colorado, was in the Oval Office meeting with the president on election integrity, and they were talking about the plans,” Martin said.

Peters was the Mesa County clerk and recorder, a position that put her in charge of local elections, including polling logistics, candidate paperwork, voter registration, and processing ballots. After the 2020 election, she swallowed the MAGA conspiracy theory that the election was rigged through voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems.

That led her to give a security badge to a fellow election conspiracist, Conan Hayes, who used the access to copy the hard drive of a voting machine while Peters ensured security cameras were turned off. The data was turned over to MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell.

For her efforts, Peters was convicted of election tampering and sentenced to nine years in prison. Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis caved to pressure from Trump in May and ultimately commuted her sentence. Since then, she has basked in positive attention from right-wing media, repeating her claims of voter fraud and asking Trump for a job.

Monday’s visit was Peters’s second time at the White House, as she was invited to meet with Trump in June.

“What she went through should never happen to anyone again,” Trump posted on Truth Social at the time. “Just think of it, she caught the Democrats cheating, and they put her in jail for Voter Fraud.”

Of course, Peters found no proof of election fraud, which raises concerns about the supposed midterm plans the president wanted to discuss with her. On Monday, Martin claimed they discussed how Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in August “that election voting machines use parts from China and Russia and foreign places and are therefore compromised.” It appears that Trump is taking the word of a convicted election fraudster and trying to mess with November’s elections.

Vice President JD Vance spoke for roughly 35 minutes at a MAGA rally in Fairbanks, Alaska, Monday evening. Within that time, he managed to admit that he really didn’t do very much while representing his home state of Ohio.

The confession came on the back of an insult toward Alaska’s Democratic Senate candidate, Mary Peltola, who served as one of the state’s representatives from 2022 to 2025.

“Her sole job was to support Alaskans in the House of Representatives. Yet she couldn’t be bothered to show up for one in five votes,” Vance said.

“I was a senator for all of two years. It’s not that hard of a job,” he continued. “You show up. You fight for your people. At a bare minimum, just show up and cast your vote.”

During another portion of the campaign stop, Vance shared an exchange he had with former senator and current State Secretary Marco Rubio in which he effectively chalked up his current role to the efficacy of conservative news pundits.

“Marco said, there are two kinds of guys in the United States Senate,” the vice president recalled. “There are the guys who want to go on TV and earn a lot of credibility for themselves, and there are guys who get things done.”

“I said, ‘Marco, first of all, don’t criticize the people who show up on TV,’” Vance said. “That made me vice president of the United States.”

The trip, which constituted Vance’s first visit to Alaska, was in support of Senator Dan Sullivan and Representative Nick Begich, both of whom were endorsed by Donald Trump.

Both Vance and Trump are expected to stay on the campaign trail for the next few weeks as the executive branch leaders attempt to prop up their struggling party members ahead of midterms. Trump, for his part, is expected to attend rallies for more than 94 percent of the time between now and November 3.

That will effectively place Trump at the center of an election cycle in which Republican candidates have increasingly tried to peel away from his influence.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published in August suggested that the president’s influence is waning: Just 13 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president—compared to a 2025 YouGov poll that found 23 percent of people felt the same way a year prior.

Top issues weighing down Trump’s popularity include the seemingly endless Iran war, the rising cost of living, an economy and supply chain thrown out of whack by the president’s reckless tariffs, the cost of health care, and the encroachment of artificial intelligence and the industry’s data centers into American communities—a hot topic that Trump has unequivocally backed.

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall used unapproved images of children in his recent attack ad against Democratic opponent Adam Hamilton.

The Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center publicly called on Marshall to stop using the campaign ad, which featured an image of its campers while accusing Hamilton of being related to a sexual abuse scandal at the Church of the Resurrection, which he founded. This has nothing to do with Tall Oaks.

“Our concern is straightforward,” Tall Oaks’ Board of Directors President Lea Ann Combs told the Kansas Reflector. “This advertisement creates a misleading association between Tall Oaks, the young people pictured and events that did not happen here. Protecting the dignity of these young people and accurately representing our organization should be a shared priority.”

Marshall’s chief of staff said the campaign believed the Tall Oaks picture was a stock image, and acknowledged it was not taken at Hamilton’s church. That wasn’t enough for the Hamilton campaign.

“Marshall lies and uses children as political pawns to distract from the fact he had pregnant mothers arrested and jailed over small medical debts, and voted to protect the predators named in the Epstein files,” said Hamilton’s campaign, striking back. “Roger Marshall is desperate to hide from his record of protecting predators, and preying on low-income families in Kansas.”

This all comes as the race for Senate in Kansas is the closest it’s been in almost 100 years, with Trump’s dismal approval rating in the state making Marshall’s chances at reelection all the more precarious.

President Donald Trump flipped out over an ugly photograph of his golf club.

The New York Times published a story Sunday about the ethical red flags surrounding Trump’s decision to hold an international summit at Trump National Doral, his private golf club in Miami, Florida. Never one to concern himself with his own ethics, Trump was more concerned about the photograph they used.

Trump accused the publication of using a “DOCTORED” picture of the building’s facade. “These people are STONE COLD LOSERS—Totally dishonest. That’s why they’re going TO HELL, and their subscription numbers are way down!” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night.

The president compared the Times photograph, taken by Scott McIntyre, showing a yellowed facade with noticeably dark and dirty spots, to a promotional photograph from the Trump Organization website, in which the facade looks white and pristine.

Earlier that day, Trump claimed the publication had used a “picture where the facade has been blackened and denigrated by them in order to make it look shoddy, filthy, and just plain BAD.”

“They want World Leaders to see this, knowing it is not the ‘TRUMP’ way,” he added.

Clearly, Trump’s way is to ignore any of the actual issues facing Americans to harp on his own petty bullshit—and that was actually his second temper tantrum of the day. The president had only just finished raging at a report that there were empty seats at his recent rally in Ohio. (Spoiler alert: there were.)

Dr. Oz thinks butter costs a dollar.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and TV doctor revealed just how out of touch he was with the average American on Fox News Monday night.

“You have no idea what things are gonna cost. I brought you some things [for] example,” he told Fox’s Laura Ingraham, holding a pack of butter. “Stick of butter, bag of peanuts. Butter in America, it’s about a buck [for] a stick like this.”

Ingraham checked him immediately.

“Where are you shopping? It’s not a buck, it’s like $4,” she said.

“I just bought this, so it’s close to that,” Oz stumbled. “Maybe it’s going bad!”

Dr OZ: We went grocery shopping. Butter in America is about a buck.

Laura Ingraham: Where are you shopping? It’s not a buck. pic.twitter.com/B9NeYUhXv0

— Lucas Sanders 👊🏽🔥🇺🇸 (@LucasSa56947288) October 5, 2026

Butter is about $4 according to the Department of Labor, but someone as wealthy as Oz likely would never remember that.

“I want to challenge Dr. Oz. I will fly out on my own dime to D.C. and we can go to every grocery store he chooses, but at least 20 and we’ll stop when he finds butter for $1 lb,” former American Heart Association Chairman Craig Beam commented. “I’ll arrange a video crew to film it all.”

It’s ridiculous that Oz confidently brought a whole pack of butter on air just to be wildly incorrect about how much the average American—whom the Trump administration claims to care about—is paying for it. This isn’t the first time Oz has exposed his lack of connection to the average consumer. In 2022, during a failed Senate run in Pennsylvania, he was widely lambasted for posting an embarrassing video of him shopping at “Wegner’s” (not a real store) complaining about how much crudités cost. It’s clear he’s just as clueless now as he was then. It’s that kind of ignorance, that kind of apathy, that defines the Trump administration. It’s painfully obvious that they just don’t care.

At a rally in Nebraska Tuesday night, President Trump told his supporters exactly what he thinks about the well-being of the American people.

Trump first said that the prices of goods and services, which have gone up thanks to his ill-advised Iran war and tariff policies, were “just a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe—keeping our country safe.

“They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”

Trump: "With the war, it's just artificial. It's a little bit high. It's a small price to pay ... let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay." pic.twitter.com/iIelj5sPUt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 5, 2026

Conservative activists have argued that Trump didn’t really mean that losing the two cities is a “small price to pay,” but that he was referring to high gas prices. In that generous interpretation, Trump was arguing that his war, which has killed scores of civilians in the Middle East and an estimated 23 U.S. soldiers, is preventing Iran from waging large-scale attacks on American cities. But Iran’s targets during the war have been U.S. installations in the Middle East, and it wasn’t targeting American cities before the war, either.

California leaders, however, have taken his words at face value.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass blasted Trump’s words as “irresponsible,” saying the remarks “could potentially compromise” the city’s safety.

“The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives,” Bass said in a statement. The mayor of San Diego, Todd Gloria, concurred, saying his city was “not collateral damage.”

“We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay,’” Gloria wrote in a post on X. “Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

California’s Democratic nominee for governor, Xavier Becerra, also criticized the president’s speech.

“Thirteen million Californians call LA and San Diego counties home,” Becerra said. “Their lives are not a ‘small price to pay’ or a punchline for Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, gas prices continue to go up thanks to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and its allies in Yemen, the Houthi militia, controlling the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea. As of Tuesday morning, the average price of gas nationwide is $4.37 per gallon, while diesel fuel is a whopping $6.32 per gallon.

Trump’s claims that the war is almost over belie the fact that talks aren’t going anywhere right now. The president rejected Iran’s peace proposal on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month, and mediators haven’t made much headway. Meanwhile, the conflict has escalated in recent days as the Houthis have attacked Saudi Arabia’s airports, with the Saudis bombing Yemeni targets in response. The midterms are less than one month away, and Trump has nothing to show for his war.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Donald Trump has been holding rallies lately to energize his voters for the midterms, but he’s running into problems. Press scrutiny of his declining crowd sizes has been harsh, and he exploded in a crazed rant over this, fuming that in fact his rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.

But if anything, these rallies are an admission of weakness and failure. Republicans themselves are leaking word that Trump’s campaigning is a signal of the midterm emergency the GOP faces in deep red areas. And one rally in Ohio displayed a scene that’s doubly revealing along these lines.

We’re getting into all of this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, a skilled interpreter of MAGA, who has a good piece on Trump’s epic but failing struggle to make voters like him. Amanda, always good to have you on.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Trump has done rallies in Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas, and he’s doing one Monday night in Nebraska. The Times had two pieces showing his crowd size is diminishing considerably.

In Alabama, the Times reports, upper sections were, quote, “almost completely empty,” in an arena that’s smaller than previous ones. And there were empty sections at an even smaller arena in Ohio, the Times noted. Amanda, even more to the point, polls are showing Republicans turning on him in spite of all these efforts. Your thoughts on all that?

Marcotte: Yeah, I think it’s twofold. I think obviously he’s aging, he’s getting even weaker. The political situation is so embarrassing right now that even his loyal supporters are beginning to be uncomfortable. We are hitting that same portion of, like, Bush’s second term, where even his voters just didn’t want to defend him anymore.

It feels, I think, for a lot of the people that support him, it feels kind of pointless at this point. Like, so much of the reason that a lot of Trump supporters kept doubling down and doubling down and doubling down was that they wanted to never admit they were wrong to liberals, first of all.

And second of all, as long as this political project had legs and they could kind of keep reviving the corpse and pushing into the future, it had value to them. So there was a purpose behind blind loyalty. But you can’t reelect Trump. It’s not worth it anymore, now that he’s a lame duck and there’s only so much juice they can squeeze out of this lemon.

Sargent: So Trump raged wildly at the Times for questioning his crowd sizes. He posted on Truth Social that his Ohio rally was “great” and “PACKED,” in all caps. He accused the Times of dishonesty. And he said this about his rallies:

“The rallies are HOTTER than ever. The networks refuse under any circumstances to show the crowds, but you can hear the thunderous applause, and you know that it represents thousands and thousands of people.”

He also said: “I never have empty seats, never have and never will.”

Amanda, I don’t know, for someone who’s doing so smashingly well, Trump sounds awfully angry and unhappy. Your thoughts about that?

Marcotte: I mean, wasn’t it at one of these rallies he literally got up and said that he knows more about every subject on the planet, on the whole planet, than any other person knows about anything? When you’re standing there being like, I’m the greatest of all time, and to a half-empty crowd—it’s like the trope on television when somebody says something and then comically they get disproven the next minute.

Sargent: And on top of that, this actually gets at a real thing, which is that in three of these states that he’s held rallies in, there really are tough Senate races—Texas, Ohio, and even Nebraska, which has somehow become closer now. In fact, one GOP lawmaker from a state Trump recently visited told CNN, quote, “this is a five-alarm fire.”

Amanda, the five-alarm fire is among MAGA and Republican voters. Obviously, the internal data is showing cratering support among Republican voters, especially MAGA ones. The Fox poll of Texas actually showed non-MAGA Republicans not approving of Trump. Like, more non-MAGA Republicans disapprove of Trump than approve of him.

Marcotte: I think it’s also true that they have this perception, and I don’t think it’s incorrect, that whatever Trumpism is, was, and whatever they got out of it, that’s coming to an end. And no one wants to be the last person at a party, right?

Sargent: Right. Right. I think that’s a real dynamic for sure.

Marcotte: Yeah. And I think that it’s not unreasonable for people that saw Donald Trump as their pathway to the kind of culture war victories that they were hoping to get, many of which they did—deportations, abortion bans coming back, you know, homophobia has been surging back, that sort of thing.

I mean, they got a lot of victories. Open racism has been normalized again. So they did get a lot of victories. And now he’s just this embarrassment. He got them into this war, he’s ruining the economy. He’s a lame duck. So this is a good time to sort of do an Irish exit.

Sargent: At this rally in Ohio, Trump talked about how Haitian immigrants who used to get temporary protected status are now getting deported. And he lied about how they’ve hurt the town of Springfield. In fact, the Haitian influx has done a lot to help reinvigorate the place.

Immigrants have reinvigorated the left-behind heartland in many ways, the places where Americans, especially young Americans, have deserted. But that aside, the crowd got very excited when Trump said the Haitians are getting sent back to their home country, where the conditions are horrific. They started to chant: “deport, deport.”

Amanda, before we get to the culture war stuff here, they get mad when people like us say that the lifeblood of MAGA is sadism, but there you have it on full display. That is the lifeblood of MAGA.

Marcotte: Yeah. And I think the reason that Trump rallies have been as popular as they are, even though it’s the same thing over and over again, is precisely this. There’s safety in numbers.

I think a lot of the people that have this sadistic desire to inflict pain on women, minorities, LGBTQ people—they don’t necessarily feel comfortable saying that on an individual basis. But when they go to a rally, they can chant hateful, racist things like that and get that glee, and they’re kind of anonymous.

Sargent: They’re actually kind of losing the culture wars over immigration, in a certain sense. And I think this Ohio scene displayed it in an interesting way. The New York Times had some polls over the weekend of these Senate races. Just going to read the top lines. James Talarico, the Democrat, is ahead in Texas, 51 to 45. Mary Peltola is ahead in Alaska, 50 to 43, also the Democrat. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is up three points. In Iowa, Josh Turek, the Democrat, is down one. And Kansas is tied, which is incredible.

But here’s the thing I want to get to. In all these states, Donald Trump is underwater on immigration. That means that among likely voters, more than half disapprove of his performance on immigration. Again, this is in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. All states Trump won by double digits. And get this: the percentages who strongly disapprove are in the forties in all these states.

I have not seen numbers like this before. I mean, he has completely lost the deep red states on his best issue. And here you’ve got, like, a bunch of MAGA people in a bubble chanting the words “deport, deport, deport,” thinking that they’re winning this debate in some sense. But in reality it’s just crushing Republicans, even in these red states. What do you make of all that?

Marcotte: After the shootings in Minneapolis, I felt like this was probably going to—I’m surprised at how much it has turned around, but I felt like this was going to happen. Thomas Edsall in The New York Times had a really good article recently where he shared some research that showed that while Republican voters have become kind of more racist under Trump, the opposite has happened to Democratic voters.

Which is to say, I think they’ve had to think about some of these issues a little bit more than they used to, and they’ve discussed them. And I think their racial tolerance levels have gone up in response. And that’s an interesting thing.

And I suspect that’s happening kind of in the center too, where a lot of people who had a delusion about this country’s racism and had convinced themselves it wasn’t that serious are seeing this happen, and they’re finally admitting that, like, Haitians are just, like, normal people that want to work hard and raise their families, you know?

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. I do want to point out, though, that there’s a little bit of cause for optimism in this. Because if you’ve got majorities in these states that Trump carried by double digits turning against Trump on immigration, what it means is that the people that were chanting “deport, deport, deport” kind of represent an increasingly fringe minority.

The MAGA sadism is a minority position at this point, even in some of these red states. And it’s kind of creating this opening for Democrats to capture some of these much softer Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are horrified by what they’re seeing, don’t relish it the way the MAGA sadists do, and could potentially be looking for something else.

I think there’s potentially cause for real gains to be made there, in terms of building a larger consensus kind of in favor of immigration. What do you think?

Marcotte: Yeah, I think absolutely. And I think it’s moments like this that you can actually start to change people’s minds, right? The door has been cracked open. You know, they took it so far that they’re causing some people that otherwise were kind of softly racist towards immigrants to feel bad, and to maybe reconsider some of the opinions they had.

Sargent: For MAGA, Trump’s promise was that he would defeat us, right? He would crush you and me, basically. He would crush liberal America, you know, destroy us culturally, rout us in the culture wars permanently, put America back on a anti-woke path, or whatever the precise thing they want is.

But that hasn’t happened, right? It’s not happening, in the sense that majorities are rejecting him on immigration. They’re rejecting the white nationalism. And, you know, their candidates are in trouble in very deep red areas as a result of this.

And so maybe the fact that liberal America is fighting back and is mobilizing and is so energized and is really ready to take this all the way, right—take this to the mat, as it were—is itself a dissuading factor for some of these MAGA Republicans.

They say, well, OK, you know, he’s not actually crushing them. He’s not crushing Amanda Marcotte and Greg Sargent, or whatever. You know what I mean? He’s not crushing those libs. So I don’t know, man, I’m not sure I’m on this train anymore. Does that seem crazy?

Marcotte: No, that’s really perceptive. I love it. I love it. That’s amazing. Because it’s like—you’re right, like, many broken promises from Trump. He’s going to lower prices. He’s going to keep us out of wars. He’s going to crush the libs. Add that to the list of broken promises. I love it.

And yeah, I think, you know, it also just—there was that one moment, like right after he won, for a few months, where there was this sense that MAGA was, like, culturally ascendant. And it started to crack apart, right? Basically right when Charlie Kirk died, honestly. And like, Jimmy Kimmel—they tried to fire him, and instead it showed, like, there was this support for Jimmy Kimmel.

And I think at that point they began to realize that actually most Americans still think that they are not cool, and they will never be cool. And I think that that’s been a shot in the arm culturally for the left, and has been very depressing for the right. And you love to see it.

Sargent: Well, you know what else happened at around the time when that supposed cultural ascendancy seemed to suddenly waver and start tailspinning down? Two things. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to a foreign torture prison, and ICE started invading cities. I think that really was one of the things that started the unraveling.

Marcotte: Yeah, no, I mean, part of what MAGA was able to do to sort of make themselves seem cool, even for a minute, was they presented their fascist ideas as, like, arch irony, right? They’re like, these are jokes and memes and silly stuff.

But you can’t, like, pull a gun on somebody and force them into a concentration camp in a joking way. And they tried. They really did try. Like, ICE and DHS were putting out all these memes. They had, like, the cartoon meme of the woman crying as she was getting arrested and stuff. But it’s not funny. It’s not funny, because that’s a real person.

Like, I think for normal people that voted for Trump—they lied, a lot of people allowed themselves to believe it really was just jokes, that the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing was just a joke. No, they meant that. They meant that in the same way that Nazis saying similar things about Jews meant it.

And there becomes the moment where the proof starts to happen that they meant it. And that clip about Donald Trump leading a bunch of people chanting “deport”—like, those are real people. Now, they were always real people, but I think in a lot of people’s imaginations that was a joke. And now you cannot deny that they are actually uprooting these people and sending them to a violent country that they were trying to escape.

Sargent: And if you think about the videos that just absolutely saturated the culture, saturated social media, of the shooting of first Renata Good and then second Alex Pretti—in the Renata Good one especially, you could hear the crack of gunfire. You could hear the shots.

And those break through all the memes and all the cartoon stuff and all the hilarity and all that sort of stuff. And then the car just sort of slowly rolling down the road with a dead person slumped over the steering wheel, and then essentially hitting a pole. Like, that just broke the memes, I think.

Marcotte: Yeah. It’s very reminiscent of how a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests rose up out of seeing video of people getting killed by police. And you know, that has a clarifying effect on the mind. Because yeah, now it’s not a cartoon anymore. That’s a person. That person has a family, you know.

Sargent: Yeah. Well, just to completely wrap this up, where do you see this going? You’ve got Trump doing these rallies. He’s obviously struggling to boost energy in MAGA country. I fear it’s going to be a little bit successful.

Like, they are going to bring Republicans back into the fold, especially because they’re going to outspend Democrats by around $200 million or something. And we’re going to see potentially the polls tighten. I think people should be prepared for that.

Marcotte: I cannot emphasize enough how much, in some communities in this country, the idea of voting for a Democrat is the equivalent of selling your child into slavery. It’s treated as—they are literally told that it’s demonic, that you will literally go to hell if you vote for a Democrat. And so I think a lot of people are going to struggle to do that, even though they know in their heart that it’s the right thing to do.

So yeah, I think a lot of them, if they go to the voting booth, I think they’re going to vote for the Republican. That said, they’re going to have a turnout problem. I think a lot of people aren’t going to want to make that choice. And so they’re probably just going to sit this one out.

Sargent: Yep. It sure looks like it’s trending in the right direction. Amanda Marcotte, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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