The New Republic

A new Fox poll showing James Talarico ahead in the Texas Senate race unnerved Fox figures. One MAGA guest on Fox exclaimed: “Texans have to wake up!” The poll also has truly terrible news for Trump: His approval is upside down in this reliably red state, he’s cratering with Latinos, and he’s losing the working class, which is his base. He’s even underwater with non-MAGA Republicans, a key demographic that Talarico has worked to win. This comes as Republicans are leaking word that they’re shifting spending out of the North Carolina Senate race, which appears gone. They’re putting more into shoring up the MAGA-GOP candidate in Iowa and even Kansas Senator Roger Marshall, showing serious worry deep in MAGA country. We talked to political theorist Alan Elrod. We discuss how the Texas GOP’s white male supremacy and violent ethnonationalism perfectly represent today’s Republican Party, and how it’s deeply alienating mainstream America. We also dig into how it’s all creating space for a new moral language to emerge among Democrats. Listen to this episode here.

In the 1972 movie The Candidate, Bill McKay, played by Robert Redford, shockingly wins a Senate seat. Surrounded by ecstatic staff and volunteers, a stunned and panicky McKay pulls aside his manager and asks, “What do we do now?”

That will be the relevant question for Democrats in the House and Senate if the wave election that looks increasingly possible comes true and they win control of both houses of Congress. There will be initial euphoria from everybody hoping to put a halt to the nihilism and march toward corrupt autocracy driven by the destructive narcissist Donald Trump and his minions.

But the euphoria won’t last. The task for a party holding Congress and facing a hostile president with no regard for laws, norms, or the Constitution and its separation of powers—and a Supreme Court that has unleashed him—will be daunting. If Democrats in the majority don’t handle it well, their majority may not last long—and the country’s democracy and well-being will suffer deeply.

Start with three big challenges. First, a lot of those who voted for Democrats are expecting action to improve their economic conditions: Run on affordability, you better improve affordability. Second, and related, with Democrats holding a sizable piece of power in Washington, the failures of policy driven by the reckless Trump and his administration could be blamed on them—and it is a sure thing that hundreds of millions will be spent by Trump allies to try to pin the problems on the Democrats. Americans already think Washington isn’t working; if it looks like Democrats are a part of the problem and not of the solution, that could have brutal consequences in 2028.

Third, it is clear that the Democratic Party base wants toughness and serious pushback against the corruption, misconduct, and mayhem that are the core of Trump’s presidency. Witness the negative reaction to the private meeting between House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, looking for areas of possible common ground after January 3. Rank-and-file Democrats want pushback, not compromise. Of course, compromise will be necessary to meet the first challenge of improving people’s economic circumstances. But if it is not led by Democrats using every tool at their disposal to name names, kick ass, and stop further destruction, there will be hell to pay with the base.

What are those tools? I see six of them. First, of course, is lawmaking: the ability to pass bills and get them enacted into law—or if not, to lay down markers of what you would do if in full power, and what the other side wants to negate or block. That includes putting restraints on ICE to limit and hold it accountable for its predations, reducing or removing Trump’s tariff disasters, restoring defense readiness and making sure we are ready for twenty-first-century warfare, rebuilding our food and drug safety capacity to account for the serial lapses, among other things.

And to accomplish these goals without being stymied by GOP filibusters, consider reforming the Senate’s Rule XXII, not by eliminating the filibuster but by putting the onus on the minority by flipping the numbers—41 required to continue debate, not 60 required to end it.

Second, and related, is the power of the purse: the ability to tax and spend, to replenish programs that have been slashed or eliminated, to cut funds from programs bloated and misused by a president, and to put restrictions on how dollars are redirected from the purpose specified by Congress (see Park Service maintenance used instead for Trump vanity projects, and money earmarked for minority health protections used for RFK Jr.’s security). The power is also there to increase or cut taxes on different categories and groups.

Using reconciliation, which requires only a majority in the Senate, Democrats can pass and send to Trump tough spending measures to right the balance toward decency and the rule of law—but vetoes and confrontation over appropriations bills and continuing resolutions to keep the government funded will likely lead to possible government shutdowns. Democrats cannot afford to blink and concede to Trump on these.

Third is investigations and oversight: to dig into wrongdoing, corruption, lawbreaking, and malfeasance inside and out of government, along with the failure to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Fourth, and related, is the bully pulpit: the ability to use debate on the floor and in committees, and the megaphone provided by the legitimacy of Congress, to report to the public what you are doing and to shed light on failures or gaps in norms, laws, and policy. Fifth is advice and consent in the Senate: the power to examine the qualifications and character of presidential nominees for federal courts and executive positions, and to reject those unworthy of confirmation. Sixth is impeachment: the power in the House to hold miscreants to account and recommend their removal to the Senate.

So what do they do if and when “now” occurs? It can start with accountability. That means hearings that bring in—via subpoena, if necessary—every miscreant who violated the law, implemented disastrous policy, grifted, or lied to Congress. It also requires changing the rules to change the nature of the hearings—no more of the tired, disjointed, and ineffectual five minutes of questions for the majority, five for the minority, with each majority member freelancing without coherence and witnesses able to bob and weave and filibuster for five minutes, followed by a five-minute breather from a friendly questioner. Do 30 minutes at a time, with the initial questions done by expert staff to establish the predicates for the hearing and frame the inquiry, and disciplined and coordinated questions by majority members in each 30-minute interval to follow.

One important reason for the hearings is to use Congress’s power to document the violations of law and norms by virtually every Cabinet member, key White House staffers, and nongovernment employees sent to negotiate with foreign governments. If witnesses refuse repeatedly to appear under subpoena, and they are held in contempt of Congress, no reliance on referring them to Todd Blanche’s Justice Department. In extreme cases, order the Capitol Police to arrest them and create holding cells in the Capitol. That is clearly within the power of Congress.

It also has to include making sure that the statute of limitations does not run out on illegal acts perpetrated by anyone in the federal government or among private contractors or private citizens carrying out illegal acts on behalf of the administration or with cover from it, from perjury to assault to murder to bribery to grift and insider trading. And it means passing reforms to block further misuse of office and to punish corrupt actors. If Republicans filibuster those reforms, or Trump vetoes them, hold them accountable in every venue for the cover-ups. And see above for the best way to restore the original meaning of the filibuster.

It should also include selective impeachment—not of the president, which would be a fool’s errand, but of Cabinet and other officials who have sullied their offices and endangered the security and health of Americans and of our national security. Among those who should be first in line: Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche, RFK Jr., Russell Vought, Brooke Rollins, Kash Patel, Brendan Carr, Doug Burgum, Howard Lutnick, and Bill Pulte. Even if none would be convicted by the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required, the process of bringing forward articles of impeachment detailing their corruption, malfeasance, illegalities, and failures, much of it to be documented in the hearings above, with debate on the floor of the House, would serve to underscore the devastation wrought by this horrific administration—and force House Republicans either to endorse the monstrous behavior or reject it. Of course, to make impeachment effective, these need to be staggered so that the enormity of their individual perfidy can sink in before moving on to the next.

Next comes a positive agenda. The policy part can include golden oldies like free community college and subsidized childcare, but it requires a fresh approach to the substantive challenges the country faces. That has to include reducing barriers to implementing policies like infrastructure, and addressing festering problems like housing shortages, childcare, the health crises amplified by radical cuts in Medicaid and the removal of tens of millions from health insurance, the climate crisis, the threats from AI, and ways to reduce the burgeoning inequality. Relying less on bureaucracy and regulations and more on creative ways of empowering individuals and implementing public-private partnerships and relationships is necessary. So is finding ways to protect women and reproductive health, and righting the wrongs against all minorities. Lots of groups are working on fresh approaches to our biggest problems. Whether laws get passed and enacted or not, the agenda has to be available for presidential candidates to embrace in 2028.

The second part of that agenda is reforms both to curb abuses and to reboot a broken political system. In the former category, we need to repeal or curb the Insurrection Act, repeal or restrict the myriad emergency powers granted the president, always under the assumption that the president would act in the national interest, an assumption that no longer holds. We need to reform the Inspectors General Act to make it far harder for the president to negate any independent oversight of wrongdoing in agencies; the Vacancies Act, which lets a president bypass the Senate’s advice and consent power, which Trump has repeatedly abused; and there is an urgent need to restore the agencies and powers that regulate ethical standards throughout the government. That includes strengthening the Hatch Act to keep political figures from using their positions for partisan political purposes.  

It also includes hearings, and possibly an attempt at a constitutional amendment, to restrain the presidential pardon power, which Trump has despoiled into a pay-to-play scheme. An amendment that makes clear a president cannot pardon himself and that pardons in return for favors can be rejected by the courts should be a slam dunk.

Congress should also revisit the Budget and Impoundment Control Act to make it even more clear that the illegal use of “pocket rescissions” by Russell Vought and Trump to negate the congressional power of the purse is out of bounds; to require presidents to distribute to all states, not just the ones he likes, federal aid that uses allocation formulas; and to institute criminal penalties, with extended statutes of limitations, for officers of the Postal Service and the IRS if they use their positions for partisan purposes. It should alter the law to make clear that presidents cannot change the White House, other federal buildings, or federal property without approval from an independent body that is not under presidential control.

Congress should also work on reforming itself and fixing the parts of the election and voting system broken by Trump and John Roberts. These measures would include: enlarging the House by 150 from its current 435 members; repealing the 1967 law requiring single-member districts and creating opportunities for multimember districts with ranked-choice voting; reforming the redistricting process to require independent commissions in every state; adding not just Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states but also considering the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa; re-passing a tough and meaningful Voting Rights Act and campaign finance reform to overcome the outrageous Shelby County and Citizens United decisions; and taking away the power of antidemocratic billionaires to swamp the system with money and buy policies that enrich them more. Laying out markers, at least, for adjusting the imbalances in a Constitution built for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not one where soon 70 percent of Americans will live in just 15 states, should be on the to-do list.

Supreme Court reform should be high on the agenda, starting with something that might actually get enacted—a tough and enforceable code of ethics for rogue justices who have repeatedly shown disdain for ethical standards. The code that Chief Justice John Roberts put in effect after sustained criticism is hollow and unenforceable. A code that uses an independent office of judicial ethics, akin to the Office of Congressional Ethics, consisting of former judges and judicial ethics experts, to examine allegations of unethical behavior and recommend appropriate remedies to the Judicial Conference that now oversees lower level federal judges, with the requirement that the Judicial Conference explain in writing if it refuses to adopt those recommendations, should be a part of it.

But there is more. There is overwhelming public support for term limits for justices; Congress should pass a bill calling for 18-year terms, effective upon enactment, with justices then given options of senior status or continued service on a special court of appeals, to fit the constitutional provision of service during good behavior. If it is enacted, for the Roberts court to try to negate it would be a blatant conflict of interest, worth challenging. Consideration of enlarging the Supreme Court to 13, to fit the 13 circuits, with the term limits then extended to 26 years, should be on the agenda. And if the Roberts court continues to bypass the Constitution to promote its radical unitary executive theory, protect Donald Trump, and negate congressional authority, it should at least hold hearings on returning the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to the original specified in the Constitution: to wit, as Section 2, Article 2 states, “In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make. Congress has the power to create a new court of appeals to hold overall appellate authority.

One other idea, admittedly a stretch but not without grounding in history, is moving the Justice Department and attorney general out of the executive branch. The initial consideration of the Judiciary Act of 1793 had the attorney general chosen by the Supreme Court. If combined with court reform, it may be worth considering.

To make some or all of this happen, Democrats in the House and Senate need to do what they have failed to do up to now: create a unified and disciplined message to let Americans know what the problems are and what they are doing about them. Trump has learned from his friend Steve Bannon that if you flood the zone with outrages, they will wash over each other and few if any will stick. The media are ill equipped to handle it, and most voters, occupied with their own lives and challenges, are not paying close attention to every corrupt act or policy outrage. If Democrats, given the timidity of the press corps and its predilection to both-sides issues and let Trump define the narrative, do not develop a discipline that includes changing the old ways of doing business and communicating, their tenure in power will be short and brutal. The way to counter the zone is to have one message pursued relentlessly for at least a week at a time.

That starts with creating a message group; a collection of lawmakers from both houses to meet at least every week to craft a message for the week, from Trump selling national security for money or favors to Republicans blowing up health insurance and access for millions of Americans; to RFK Jr. and his allies undermining responses to epidemics and pandemics and causing deaths from measles and other ailments; to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins shredding food safety; to the American gestapo tactics of Steven Miller, Tom Homan, and ICE; to the deterioration of national parks as Trump drains their money to pay for his perks. The message is not just the outrage but what Democrats say they will do about it, from holding miscreants accountable to proposing solutions to policy failures.

Each week should start with a press conference, followed by coordinated speeches in morning hours, on each floor during regular business, in special orders in the evening, in as many committees with hearings and markups that are relevant to the issue of the week, and with TV, radio, and social media appearances and podcasts, including by their allies outside Congress. If the solution is legislation that passes the House but is stymied by a filibuster in the Senate, there has to be a strong and sustained element to the message that remedies are being blocked by the same Republicans who caused the problem in the first place.

Another innovation should be regular weekly prime-time debates on key issues, primed to the message of the week, on the House and Senate floors, with perhaps two members on each side, to show that Congress is serious about the importance of debate and dialogue, and to highlight in some cases the complexities of resolving complex problems at home and abroad. If Republican lawmakers boycott, replace them with outside experts—say, former member Bob Inglis of South Carolina, a conservative who believes in market solutions for the problem of climate change. And the debates do not always have to pit Democrats against Republicans. The debates can go on YouTube and be used as springboards for media coverage and even use in classrooms and elsewhere.

Of course, a lot of this is easier said than done. If Democrats win majorities in both houses, but they are razor-thin, it may be difficult to do much other than holding hearings, and discipline might be a bridge too far. In any case, it will require a different mindset than we have seen from the leaders in both House and Senate. But the road map to relevance and an ability to turn the ship of state away from its current disastrous course is pretty clear. We know what they should do when the time comes. Let’s hope for the sake of decency and democracy that they have both the opportunity—and the will—to seize the moment.

This week, one of the most talked-about stories has been President Donald Trump’s decision to spend taxpayer money on campaign ads that the administration is misleadingly characterizing as “public service announcements.” The move is vintage Trump in that the ads are both staggeringly corrupt—the administration is spending $20 million of the Department of Homeland Security’s money on them, in violation of the Hatch Act—and propagandizing slop. One ad, which uses a song without the artist’s permission, has Trump asking people, “Love me.” Another warns of a “final battle.” So far, the administration has only spent a fraction of the money that’s been allocated to this endeavor, so you can count on seeing many more iterations of these fake PSAs, which Trump is said to be guiding.

But rather than think of this as some kind of flex, or one more scandalous abuse of the public trust, I want to suggest that what these ads represent is desperation—an acknowledgment that if Trump’s goose isn’t cooked yet, the pot is at least boiling. I also think, if anything, this fusillade of propaganda will likely backfire.

These ads haven’t generated good news for Trump; very few people outside of the administration and its obvious sycophants have tried to defend them. Moreover, the media seems resistant to give this story the “both sides” treatment. As with Trump’s 25-minute prime-time ramble last July, the political press seems wise to what’s going on. Of that aforementioned speech, TNR editor Michael Tomasky said, the overall reaction to the president’s attempt to shine us on “tells us that that power he had over people and institutions a year or 15 months ago has evanesced.” I think these PSAs do little else than advertise that fact.

I am not sure that Republican lawmakers necessarily agree with that assessment, but their own appraisals range from avoidant to withering. As MS NOW reported this week, “even congressional Republicans are expressing concern that the ads may violate the laws governing PSAs.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune is quoted in the piece as saying that he didn’t mind the message of the ad but believed “it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.” That’s about the nicest thing any Republican who made their way into the story had to say about it, with Senator Mike Rounds saying, “It’s not something I would have done” and the outgoing Thom Tillis comparing it to Viktor Orbán. “I hate it,” said Tillis, bluntly.

Trump’s midterm activities aren’t limited to these controversial ads. According to reports, the president is planning to spend 32 of the next 35 days on the road campaigning for Republicans. As Politico notes, many of his intended destinations suggest the GOP is in tremendous peril. Instead of swing states and traditionally competitive districts, Trump is visiting “bastions of conservatism” like Alabama, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Texas. He’s even going to trek out to Alaska, “a significant commitment of time and presidential resources that underscores how dire the situation is for Republicans.” As one GOP donor told Politico, “The problem is that the fires are everywhere right now.”

The biggest question is whether Trump’s growing effort to further inject himself into the midterm cycle is going to help or hinder the electoral hopes of Republican lawmakers. In at least one contentious race, the Republican candidate is calling Trump an albatross. According to leaked audio obtained by The New York Times, Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton told a room full of donors that Trump’s weird midterm convention in early September—which was held in Texas, in the hopes it would boost Paxton—had the opposite effect. “So to be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.” (As Lawfare editor Eric Columbus pointed out, it’s also not good “when your 12-person private fundraiser includes someone who hates you enough to leak damaging audio.”)

The Paxton audio is a potent snapshot of some larger trends. All across the country, we’re seeing stories of GOP strongholds edging toward collapse as onetime Trump voters bear the weight of his administration’s incompetence. There are daily reminders that other Republicans are trying to create distance between the president and their campaigns, and even defying him on key matters. On Wednesday, in fact, West Virginia Senator Jim Justice broke with Trump on the matter dearest to the president’s heart—his mass deportation machine. “Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,” he said. You think?

Over the course of the year, as Trump’s approvals hit new lows and began to decimate the GOP’s midterm ambitions, I’ve tried to figure out what Trump and his fellow Republicans could do to reverse or even just arrest those trends. For a brief mad moment, I thought that the negotiated Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Iran might provide a springboard Trump could use to extricate himself from his crazy war. This didn’t come to fruition. The truth is, to save their bacon, Republicans would have to do things they are genetically incapable of doing: improve people’s lives and fix the economy. As I pointed out two weeks ago, Republicans—despite their misgivings about Trump—are still touting their One Big Beautiful Bill Act: a document that says the wealthiest among us deserve thousands of extra dollars, and the rest of us deserve some measure of pain.

It’s all adding up to defeat. The Cook Political Report says a Democratic takeover of the House is a “done deal” and that winning the Senate is “very realistic.” The Quinnipiac generic poll of the House has Democrats opening up a 51 percent to 39 percent lead, which are bloodbath numbers. The only headwind Democrats face is that while voters seem willing to give them their vote this year, they’re not as ready to give them their affection. Still, you’d rather be the Democrats right now than the GOP, who like Vice President JD Vance have been left begging voters for a “second chance” without understanding that they’ve already received that second chance—and they’ve blown it.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson branded a group of brutalized ICE protesters as “left-wing terrorists.” Now, they’re suing him for defamation.

On October 3, 2025, Johnson accompanied top Homeland Security officials to an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, where a crowd had gathered in a designated “free speech” zone. Johnson filmed as ICE agents broke up the peaceful protest, shoving and striking attendees until they fell to the ground.

He then posted the videos to his various social media channels on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Rumble. The content featured clips of the protesters being lined up against a concrete wall, while Johnson narrated the scene, framing the civilians as “left-wing terrorists” who were “arrested for attacking police officers and ICE officers.”

But that was far from the truth and, almost a year later, two of those protesters—Harvard University data scientist Kyle Frankovich and contracted court reporter Maureen Foody—are ready to recoup damages from the reported inaccuracy.

On Friday, Frankovich and Foody filed a joint lawsuit against Johnson, claiming that Johnson knew his portrayals were false, but that he “did not care.”

The duo “sang songs, participated in prayers, held signs, and recorded official activity,” according to the complaint. Neither were charged with a crime, though they were detained for roughly eight hours and eventually released a half-mile from the jail.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s content from that day has collectively accumulated millions of views and interactions, granting the former BuzzFeed writer another pathway to rake in cash on a false narrative. (Johnson was fired from the digital outlet in 2014 for plagiarizing multiple blog posts.) One post, in which Johnson claimed he saw “dozens of Democrat domestic terrorists arrested today for VIOLENT ASSAULT on federal law enforcement” and further purported that “every activist” attending “attacked ICE agents in broad daylight” was viewed 1.7 million times.

Frankovich told MS NOW that he was “shaken” when he saw Johnson’s posts and the comments made by his followers that likened him to an antifa leader and attempted to dox his identity. Some comments included calls to torture, shoot, and kill the arrested protesters, according to the network.

The data scientist also scorned a DHS post that turned an image of his tattooed arms and zip-tied hands into a recruitment poster, framing Frankovich as a criminal.

“You shouldn’t get to lie about me,” Frankovich told MS NOW.

The Trump administration has ratcheted up their election interference efforts in Brazil, using sanctions, tariffs, and narratives to give Flávio Bolsonaro—son of right-wing hardliner and convicted traitor Jair Bolsonaro—any possible edge over incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It may very well backfire.

This has been brewing for some time. The Trump administration has threatened military action against Brazil, started classifying criminal groups there as terrorist organizations, and even sent State Department officials there to delegitimize their election system. The The U.S. Consulate in São Paulo even hosted pro-Bolsonaro social media influencers for a private roundtable. Bolsonaro’s other son, Eduardo, even floated the idea that the Trump administration might reject the outcome of the election if Lula wins. Yet all these things and more have potentially turned Brazilian voters away.

“Brazil did not want the U.S. imposition of this category on these criminal organizations because it opened the door for many ways in which the Trump administration could interfere in Brazilian internal politics,” Brown University Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies James Green told Responsible Statecraft. “Even though they haven’t overtly said, ‘Oh, Flávio is my candidate,’ they sent all these signals to indicate that that’s who the United States wants to see elected.”

While Lula’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent—much higher than Trump’s has been at any point in his second term—the election margin is expected to be close regardless. Voting begins on Sunday.

We’ve all had our laughs now at Eric Schmitt. I plan on continuing to laugh at him for quite some time. That was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen a United States senator do. But it was also two other things besides embarrassing.

First, it was deeply revealing—of the Missouri senator’s crazed conspiratorial mindset, and of his presumptions about the world. What convinced him in the first place that former special counsel Jack Smith was in cahoots with Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Perhaps it came from some dark fascist corner of the interwebs that you and I don’t even know about, and from there to X to Fox News and so on. Basically the same way people came to believe Haitians eat dogs.

It was also amusingly revealing of Schmitt’s (and his staff’s, and let’s face it, modern conservatism’s) cultural prejudices. They checked the NBA schedule and the men’s college basketball game roster and saw just one game with a 7:30 p.m. start time—Warriors vs. Hawks in Atlanta—and thought, “A-ha, we’ve got our man.” But it seems never to have occurred to them to check the women’s college schedule. After all, what kind of man wants to go watch girls bounce balls around? A deep-state Hillary lover, that’s who! They’re probably kicking themselves for not thinking of it!

But the second thing Schmitt’s own goal was, besides embarrassing, was ominous. Because it showed how deep down this absurd rabbit hole the Republicans have gone—and the depths to which they’ll descend to try to find something on Smith. This perfervid posturing was on display Tuesday not only from Schmitt, but from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, who you could tell thought he was about to lower the boom on Smith about something having to do with his clandestine relationship with former CIA chief John Brennan. When a confused Smith said he’d never met Brennan, Grassley went all Emily Litella (there’s an old reference for you!) and ended his questioning under the kind of abrupt and petulant silence one might associate with a six-year-old being bluntly informed that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

But make no mistake: MAGA is still out to nail Smith. You’d think after a humiliation as comprehensive as Tuesday’s, they’d drop it. But you know these people. They don’t drop stuff. Case in point: Schmitt has repeatedly defended his catastrophic failure, claiming he regrets nothing while continuing to insist that Smith is a liar. A fiasco like that just makes them more convinced that the ruthless deep state is out to crush them, and their only recourse is to crush the nefarious foe to dust.

What might this mean, in practice? Well, for the nonce, it has manifested itself in a lawsuit—filed the day after the hearing debacle—by Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, alleging that Smith’s probe violated the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which protects members of Congress from criminal or civil prosecution for activities they’ve undertaken in the legislative sphere. Prosecuting the case for Blackburn, who’s leaving the Senate and running for governor, is an outfit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a kind of right-wing version of the ACLU, conjured to life in 2017 with backing from groups affiliated with the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo (it made its bones fighting Covid-era mask and vaccine mandates).

The suit argues that when Smith, while probing the January 6 insurrection, subpoenaed phone companies for some GOP lawmakers’ call logs (but not the content of the calls), he was in violation of that clause. It’s an argument Republicans have been making for a while, and it’s nonsense. The speech and debate clause is a protection against being arrested and prosecuted for legislative activity.

Smith wasn’t looking for people to arrest; he was looking for witnesses to a coup d’état (like Senator Darline Graham’s late brother, Lindsey, as Smith explained to her Tuesday in yet another planned gotcha moment that flopped). In any case, the clause has generally been understood to protect only legislative activity. Admittedly, the law here isn’t settled, and these days you never know when a case like this might land in the lap of some Federalist Society servant. But there’s a reason federal judges have been in the habit of tossing MAGA suits like this.

Smith’s pursuit of these call logs is the basis of the claim by some House members, notably Jim Jordan, that Smith perjured himself before the House last January. It’s a little complicated, but: At two hearings last December, House Republicans asked Smith: “Did the toll records that you requested from the senators, did they include the content of the phone calls?” Smith replied no. It was truthful as far as it went, but it wasn’t quite the whole story because Smith and his team did see the contents of some congressional text messages from 44 legislators—but it wasn’t as a result of records requested from the senators. It was as a result of a separate subpoena, to the National Archives and Records Administration. Republicans never asked about that subpoena.

Like every good lawyer, Smith learned in law school: Answer the question you were asked, and only the question you were asked. Jordan contends that Smith was engaging in half-truths, and so he issued a criminal referral against Smith to the Justice Department in July. Jamie Raskin counters that “wishing that you had asked different questions while you had the opportunity to examine a witness is not a proper basis for a referral of a witness for criminal prosecution.” Smith’s lawyers said at the time that “the questions and answers preceding and following these exchanges also make clear that the focus of the question was on the toll records subpoenas. Notably, the referral letter does not contest the truthfulness of Mr. Smith’s answers.”

Raskin said that if the referral were ever brought before a judge, it would “get laughed out of court.” That it probably will—although again, it depends on whose court it lands in. But in between here and there, Republicans can make Smith’s life very difficult indeed. The week before Jordan issued his referral, Attorney General Todd Blanche sat before the same Senate Judiciary Committee that became America’s laughingstock this week for his confirmation hearing. Missouri (really, Missouri again?) Senator Josh Hawley, surveying Smith’s supposed transgressions, asked Blanche if he had “thought about investigating this guy for perjury?” Blanche’s answer: “We take testimony in front of this body very seriously. Yes.”

In sum: We should all be steeling ourselves for the day that Blanche files an indictment against Smith. It would be another textbook example of Republicans doing exactly what they accuse the liberal deep state of doing: using the machinery of the government to engage in political witch hunts. There’s no actual evidence that Smith was engaged in any kind of witch hunt. Republicans say his investigations were unprecedented. Well, yes, they were—but that’s because we’ve never had a president who orchestrated a coup against the United States and who carted away boxfuls of classified documents and spent months ignoring polite requests from the FBI to come down to Florida and have a look.

Any prosecution of Smith should go about as far as Trump’s other failed revenge cases. But make no mistake: It could be assigned to an Aileen Cannon–type judge. And MAGA could claim a scalp and persuade uninformed Americans that there is no such thing as a rule of law, that there is only power, which is their point.

And finally, let’s end by returning to Schmitt. He’s not an idiot. There’s a standard joke about Trump that it’s a good thing he’s so dumb because if he were a smart fascist, he’d be a lot more dangerous. Well, Schmitt, Tuesday aside, is not dumb. He knew exactly what he was saying, for example, when he gave a speech about a year ago to the National Conservatism Conference that was for all intents and purposes a fascist interpretation of American history.

It’s a clever speech—there is no single incendiary line that can be quoted to outrageous effect. But in its entirety, it’s an ode to a national mythos rooted in blood and soil (he’s smart enough not to say those words) and an explicit rejection of the notion that America is in any sense an idea. Here’s a good contemporaneous analysis by Bridgette Dunlap of the Missouri Independent.

That’s who Schmitt actually is. And crazy ambitious. Tuesday morning—the day of Smith’s testimony—Axios ran with a “scoop” that Schmitt had “grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect” to be Vance’s running mate in 2028. That was almost surely teed up by Schmitt’s staff in anticipation of the nuclear bomb he was going to explode in his Javert’s lap that afternoon. That it blew up in his face because he believes in nutso conspiracies and forgot that women play basketball is a form of cosmic justice. But it doesn’t mean the MAGA version of the deep state is done with Jack Smith.

Editor’s note: Commentators are expressing concern about a Time cover story by Eric Cortellessa in which our commander in chief’s mind appears to wander. Maybe, they’re saying, the old bird is losing his marbles. 

But we’ve been through this before. What Trump Derangement Syndrome–addled philistines fail to grasp is that our president is a poet. As Trump explained two years ago, he applies a rhetorical technique called “the weave,” about which “friends of mine that are, like English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’” 

In October 2024, we published a digital chapbook of these Trump weavings as found verse, drawing from the campaign trail. Here we publish a sequel, drawing this time from the Time transcript.

MSDNC 

I do respect the free press
But I don’t respect fake news.
I’ll give you an example.
CNN and MSDNC—
Which is MS NOW—
They changed the name because it does so poorly. 
But I won the election. I won it handily 
By massive numbers. 
I won the popular vote. 
I won all seven swing states. 
They said if you won three swing states, 
I won all seven. 
I won the counties. 
It’s very important, 
86 percent popular vote. 
Everything, and very conclusively, 
I haven’t had a good story
On CNN
For years.

Kaitlan Collins: A Blazon

So at a certain point
You say,:
“What’s the purpose of like this crazy Kaitlan Collins?” 
She’s a very average person. 
She’s the most unhappy young person 
I’ve ever seen. 

Saudi Arabia 

I’ve done a lot for
Saudi Arabia. 
I protect 
Saudi Arabia. 
If I weren’t president
Saudi Arabia 
Wouldn’t be here right now.

Neither would Israel. 
They’d be wiped off the face of the planet. 

I do a lot for 
Saudi Arabia. 
My relationship with them
Is very good. 
I like the crown prince. 
My relationship
Is very good. 

But remember:
If I weren’t here, 
There wouldn’t be a 
Saudi Arabia.

There wouldn’t be an
Israel.

There wouldn’t be
Various other countries also. 

Song of HimselfI have the highest of IQs. 
I have the highest. 
I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. 
You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years,
And you know, I’m a—
I believe in genetics, frankly
And I understand. 
I understand it much more than I think
Any president would, because I do have 
An ability 
On this. 
I have an ability
On those things
That were the new frontiers. 
What I’ve done is 
I’ve created
For instance, these massive plants have no—
We have no electricity in our grid. A Disgusting Mess I see the Secret Service looking
And I say:
“What are you guys looking at?” 
“Sir, we think the Oval Office should be taken down
And we’ll build a new one, sir.” 
I said: “My ass,
You can’t build 
A new one. 
This is a special place.”  
The cabinet room too, which I also think—
Show them the cabinet room when they go out, okay. 
The cabinet room’s gorgeous. 
That was a mess. 
It was a disgusting 
Mess. 
This whole place was
A disgusting mess
And now
It’s perfect. 
Joe didn’t do it. 

“If you look at that Fox News poll, he’s ahead by seven points in the state of Texas,” Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt lamented on Friday, adding: “How is that possible?” The “he” is Democrat James Talarico, who leads Republican Ken Paxton in Fox’s striking new poll of Texas. This shocker prompted Earhardt’s guest to warn: “Texans have to wake up!”

In truth, both Fox figures are slightly overstating matters. The poll does show Talarico up by seven points among registered voters, 53–46. But it shows his lead is much tighter among likely voters, 51–49. The latter might matter more.

Still, Talarico’s lead among both groups is remarkable in a state where no Democrat has won statewide in decades. What’s more, the poll’s internals help shed light on Trump’s role in bringing about Talarico’s lead. Here the news for Trump is very bad, and it captures something essential about the winding-down Trump era.

Let’s start with Trump’s approval among Texans. The Fox poll finds Trump badly upside down at 44–55—remarkable in a state he carried by 14 points in 2024. Drill down, and it’s worse: Trump’s approval is underwater with non-college voters (47–53), meaning he’s losing the working class, and Latinos (38–61). He won the latter by 55–45 two years ago.

And here’s a surprise: Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA, or “non-MAGA Republicans,” at 46–53. Why does that matter? The Fox poll sheds light here too: Only 50 percent of non-MAGA Republicans are “extremely interested” in the election, which lags behind Texas likely voters overall (62 percent), and even further behind Democrats (67 percent).

It’s a big deal if non-MAGA Republicans are less enthusiastic about the election due to disapproval of Trump. Though MAGA Republicans are enthusiastic, a nontrivial number of GOP voters, alienated by Trump, may peel away and stay home.

Critically, this dovetails with the Talarico campaign’s theory of the case. Talarico is winning around 10 percent of Republican voters in the Fox poll, versus only 1 percent of Democrats going to Paxton (not a typo). This is driven by Talarico getting 22 percent of non-MAGA Republicans.

Talarico constantly says siphoning off Republicans is essential to winning. He recently described them as “disillusioned” under Trump, adding: “We have a real opportunity to build a big coalition of Democrats, independents, and Republicans.”

This opportunity really is there. In addition to getting more than one-fifth of non-MAGA Republicans, Fox finds Talarico winning nearly one-fifth of conservatives, almost exactly at parity with Paxton among non-college voters—Talarico is getting half the working class!—and edging into the requisite mid-60s with Latinos. His 79 percent of Black voters probably needs improvement, but a big tent appears to be forming.

Indeed, Chuck Rocha, an adviser to the Talarico campaign, makes a critical point about these non-MAGA Republicans: Many are exactly the voters who would have supported Senator John Cornyn, and didn’t understand why Trump ordered them to vote for corrupt adulterous dirtbag Paxton in the primary. Talarico’s ads, Rocha notes, often echo attacks on Paxton from Cornyn’s primary ads.

“These non-MAGA Republican voters are the folks who liked Cornyn,” Rocha tells me. “They’re not just going to fall in line in the general when you see Talarico using the exact same issues against Paxton that Cornyn did.”

Exacerbating that dynamic is the economy: G. Elliott Morris’s new national poll finds that for the first time, a majority of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents disapprove of Trump on the cost of living. MAGA Republicans won’t let that dilute their support for Trump-endorsed candidates; non-MAGA ones, however, might.

Let’s be clear: None of this means a Talarico victory is remotely assured. This is absolutely on a knife’s edge. Talarico has led in most polls, and some quality surveys have found his lead significantly larger than Fox’s two-point likely-voter lead. Yet the averages have the race within three points. That’s very, very close. We’re talking about Texas here.

But for now, at least, what’s happening seems to confirm some basic insights about the slowly expiring Trump era. The Trump coalition is fracturing due to his peculiarly terrible misrule. Inflation, tariffs, and war are alienating working-class voters. His subjugation of the GOP into his own personal cult is alienating non-MAGA Republicans. His violent ethnic purges are driving away Latinos. The Latino shift to Trump—which was never the durable realignment observers discerned—has come undone: He’s bleeding their support even in that supposed realignment’s ground zero, the Rio Grande Valley. His corruption and dictator-megalomania are badly alienating independents.

All of which might be creating the conditions for a large anti-Trump, anti-MAGA coalition to come together, a coalition perhaps broad enough to swamp Trump-GOP rigging efforts. Crucially, Democrats are now outperforming in Texas in ways that could overwhelm the GOP gerrymander there. It all hints—let’s hope—at the very broad anti-corruption, anti-authoritarian coalition that ousted Viktor Orbán in Hungary earlier this year.

If Democrats can win the House and/or the Senate with such a coalition, it will have the party’s back in constraining Trump as the era of Late Stage Trumpism sputters out during his final two years. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First—and again, it’s all on a knife’s edge—that coalition has to really show up, and candidates like Talarico have to put this election away already.

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Inside Washington

How worried should Dems be about the GOP’s huge cash advantage?

Late Wednesday night, the Senate adjourned until after the midterms, officially kicking off the final sprint of the campaign season. Republican candidates are heading home to constituents who are concerned about President Trump’s war in Iran and the high price of essentials. Democratic candidates are meanwhile heading into November with a massive cash disadvantage. The question remains: Will floods of money be enough to overcome the anger American voters are feeling?

The Democratic National Committee had $16 million in cash on hand at the end of July, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $130 million on hand. That staggering cash gap is only compounded when you factor in the DNC’s nearly $18 million in debts owed, putting them firmly in the red.

What’s more, a Supreme Court decision in June means the Republican Party cash advantage goes further than ever before; the justices lifted the cap on coordinated donations between political parties and candidates. 

Republicans’ money advantage is particularly stark in the frontline Senate races like Texas, where party money, outside PAC spending, and individual donations are fueling unprecedentedly expensive contests. By the end of September, the race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton had seen almost $259 million in total ad spending for the general election, which was already higher than the $202 million spent in 2024, when Democrat Colin Allred faced off against Senator Ted Cruz. In September alone, GOP spending groups pumped $122 million into the state to counter Talarico’s increasingly high polling numbers.

In the first three weeks of September, Republicans outspent Democrats by more than $100 million in the seven Senate races rated as a “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report. In total, AdImpact estimates that a staggering $11.6 billion will be spent during the 2026 cycle, which is more than both the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential cycle.

But it’s less clear what that spending will actually buy. “Money is important, but it’s not everything,” said Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability. “Public angst, deep public concern, can offset the type of money advantage—or at least mitigate some of the money advantage—that you’re seeing today.”

Some Democratic candidates are using the GOP’s cash advantage to ring alarm bells among supporters, hoping to pull in cash from small-dollar donors. “The GOP outspending us 3-to-1 is working, and now this race is within their reach,” a fundraising email from Chris Pappas’s campaign on Thursday read. Pappas is running for Senate in New Hampshire against Republican John Sununu. The race is surprisingly tight, experts told The New Republic in early September, and new forecasting confirms it: The Cook Political Report shifted the race toward Republicans—from “lean D” to “toss-up”—on September 15.

Senate hopefuls aren’t the only ones facing high levels of spending. A handful of House races have racked up massive price tags too. All in all, the GOP has spent or booked $454 million on House races to Democrats’ $381 million. In swing districts, that spending disparity is heightened. In New York’s 17th congressional district, GOP Representative Mike Lawler has benefited from $20 million in spending since the start of August, compared to a meager $3.8 million for Cait Conley, his Democratic opponent.

The real impact of Republicans’ cash advantage will only be clear when polls close on November 3. But until then, we have one clear indicator that money might not be everything in 2026: the generic ballot. And signs point to a potential tsunami for Democrats. In August, Democrats had an eight-point lead on Emerson College Polling’s generic congressional ballot, which measures which party voters might vote for, regardless of the specific candidates. Come September, that lead widened to a whopping 11 points.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

A new poll shows Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in a dead heat with her Republican challenger, John Braun, in Washington’s swingy 3rd congressional district. Interestingly, 11 percent of likely voters still appeared to be undecided in the survey, commissioned by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Gluesenkamp Perez has broken with Democrats on more than one occasion recently to advance a GOP agenda that would have otherwise failed—a move that embarrassed and angered other Dems but was widely seen as reflecting her challenging reelection position. A lot of her home-district Democratic voters, however, are also frustrated with Gluesenkamp Perez: 16.7 percent of them voted for progressive challenger Brent Hennrich in the August primary.  

On the other hand, The Washington Post reviews the prospects of Scott Colom, running for Senate in Mississippi against Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. It’s a “long shot” in a state Trump won by 23 points, write Dan Merica and Gregory S. Schneider, but “top Democratic officials and donors [are] increasingly hopeful that he could pull off the inconceivable,” given “this year’s poor political environment for Republicans.”

The DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey, that will reportedly be supplying Microsoft with computing power may have emitted 140 tons of nitrogen oxides over the course of “nearly a year before state regulators stepped in,” Floodlight’s Evan Simon reports at The Guardian. This is a follow-up to a piece from last week in which Simon and Brad Racino revealed that the data center had been running “at least 45 gas generators” without a permit. Nitrogen oxides have been linked to respiratory problems and heart attacks in humans, and Rutgers University’s Xiaomeng Jin calculates that the data center ranks as one of “the state’s top five NOx polluters of 2025.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

In case you missed it: Data for Progress released a new survey on American social activity this week, and the results are a mix of sobering and fascinating. From 1995 to 2026, the percentage of people who say they’ve entertained at home in the past year dropped from 88 percent to 67 percent, while the percentage of people who say they’ve finished reading a book in the same time period dropped from 80 percent to 62 percent. But staying late at work has dropped too, while going to a concert or an exercise class has gone up. Going out to breakfast, giving or attending a dinner party, picnics, communal worship, clubs, and a class are all way down, while internet use, unsurprisingly, has skyrocketed.  

“Can a clean economy be built at the speed and scale that this moment demands?” At the Center for American Progress, Jessica Keller reviews the “lessons” from New York City’s Climate Week in late September. No real surprises here: Keller highlights the importance of “forward-looking policies that invest in emerging technology and industrial emissions reductions,” union jobs, and “clean, abundant power” that doesn’t increase households’ utility bills. But all of this, Keller writes, requires “bold, progressive leadership.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: James Talarico

Democrats have been disappointed before in Texas, but reports keep rolling in suggesting that Talarico is defying all expectations. He’s outraised Republican opponent Ken Paxton in rich Republican neighborhoods, Newsweek reported on Wednesday. New data seems to show that he has erased Trump’s 2024 gains with Latino voters, TNR’s Greg Sargent observes. And crucially, an Axios analysis of 2026 versus the 2018 Beto O’Rourke flameout shows 2026 looking much more favorable for Democrats in Texas on several key metrics, especially based on primary turnout.

Bad Week: Eric Schmitt

No need to belabor this one: You really don’t want the first reports that you might be on the 2028 presidential ticket to hit the internet at the same time as viral videos of you screwing up sports team names and getting owned by Amy Klobuchar in a congressional hearing.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

The Oval Office didn’t exist when the White House was built in the 1790s. Under what president was the first Oval Office built? Hint: It coincided with the construction of the West Wing—in other words, at a time when the size of the president’s staff began to grow. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

Texas Representative and former Senate candidate Jasmine Crockett tried to jump-start her lobbying career before even leaving office.

Reporting from Zeteo showed that Crockett, who lost a contentious Democratic primary to state Representative James Talarico, was advertising her political consultation services on her merchandise website the “Clapback Collection.” The services available were listed as “Campaign management and strategy,” “Communications and public relations,” “Government relations and lobbying,” “Digital and social media,” and “Political risk management.” The page has since been taken down but can be accessed via the Wayback Machine at the time of this writing.

The website was taken down after Zeteo reached out to Crockett’s office.

“This website is and has always been focused on selling campaign merchandise,” a spokesperson for Crockett said. “The Congresswoman has only advertised it for merchandise and did not build it.

“She never directed anyone to add the button you are inquiring about.”

Crockett’s move has raised some eyebrows. “Not waiting until you leave congress to start lobbying is impressive,” Drop Site’s Ryan Grim wrote on X.

It’s abundantly clear that Crockett cares about herself and whatever career she might have after politics much more than she cares about the constituents of her district, or helping Democrats take Texas. Crockett has refused to simply endorse Talarico, instead sparring with people online and making a guest appearance at a Chris Brown concert.

The Group of Seven Nations agreed Friday to release 100 million barrels of oil from its stockpiles—following a desperate plea from the White House.

The G7 held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss global energy costs. The discussion came in the wake of a pressing call between Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, during which the U.S. leader asked for assistance amid the current oil crisis and floated the idea of banning U.S. diesel exports, according to CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan.

The global coalition consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. The barrels are expected to hit the market over the next four months.

In a statement, the group said that it had “agreed on decisive, coordinated measures to stabilize immediate energy supplies, shield households and businesses from price shocks, and strengthen the long-term resilience of global energy systems.”

Trump announced after the meeting that “Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil. The process will begin immediately.”

Two diplomats that spoke with Politico suggested that the G7 declaration was little more than a reiteration of an agreement initially drawn up in March, when the International Energy Agency led an effort to release some 400 million barrels of oil. That oil sale was stalled due to the low availability of cheaper U.S. crude oil, though an EU diplomat told Politico that the oil was finally released.

The price of oil and gas has gone up exponentially since the start of the Iran war and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In early February, weeks before the Trump administration initiated the conflict, gas cost approximately $2.99 per gallon. Today, a gallon costs $4.39 on average, according to the AAA fuel price tracker.

This time last year, diesel cost an average of $3.70 a gallon, according to AAA. Today, it costs $6.37 a gallon.

This story has been updated.

The bar for America’s highest elected office keeps sinking.

The nation’s totally healthy, very fit, 80-year-old president gave himself a little pat on the back Thursday after he managed to climb on the rally stage at the Peterbilt Motors manufacturing facility in Denton, Texas.

The celebration came amid a dig at the health of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.

“Don’t forget, when Biden left the stage he spoke very shortly, like two minutes, one minute, as quickly as possible,” Trump said. “Could never find the stairs.”

“I don’t have that problem. You know, these things—you know how many stairs they have?” Trump continued. “Look, I can go ramp, and I can go stair, I can go another stair, another stair in the back, I have a stair here—he could never find a stair.”

"I can go ramp, I can go stairs" -- Trump's audience in Texas gives him an extremely tepid round of applause as he brags about being able to go up stairs without falling pic.twitter.com/SvQFajZZGO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2026

Trump is the second oldest man to ever serve as America’s commander in chief. The octogenarian has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center on multiple occasions since he returned to office, has fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, appeared lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurs his speech, and seems to almost chronically suffer from discolored and bruised skin.

His behavior has also grown increasingly erratic, as he has thrown cheap and petty insults at members of the press, challenged longstanding U.S. alliances, and even taken jabs at the pope.

But Trump has nonetheless insisted that he is perfectly fit to keep the country’s most important job. Since 2024, the self-styled “stable genius” has “aced” several cognitive exams, though his recollections of the tests’ contents have called into question whether he actually took them at all.

The American public is apparently wising up to Trump’s age: A national Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll conducted in July found that public perceptions of Trump’s mental health were on par with Biden’s, with 46 percent of respondents rating Trump’s mental sharpness as “poor.”

Vice President JD Vance thinks that Americans are too worried about the “little things” ahead of midterms—like gas prices, debt, Immigration and Customs Enforcement killings, and war. 

“This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things.… I think every single person who voted for us in 2024 could find something where they wish maybe congressional Republicans had gone further,” Vance told Fox News on Thursday. “The challenge here is between Democrats who want to destroy the country, who want to permanently disempower you … and Republicans who fundamentally are trying to solve the problems that Democrats under Joe Biden created.” 

Vance: This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things. We need to get more done which is why you need to give us two more years to get more great results for the American people pic.twitter.com/lhGetkOvkt

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

Vance was promptly lambasted online for the out-of-touch comment, something that’s become a bit of a trend for Republicans as they struggle to sell their platform to dissatisfied Americans as midterms approach. 

“So worrying about grocery prices, gas increases and no jobs is ‘griping??’” one liberal account posited. 

“By every metric Trump, Vance and the GOP took what the Biden administration left them and made it worse for the American people,” said another. “If you want to give them two more years, your momma done dropped you on your head. Twice.”

It’s clear that Republicans are grasping at straws, panicking ahead of what is widely predicted to be a brutal midterm rebuke. Just two weeks ago, Vance was begging Americans for “another chance.”  

Donald Trump is attempting to retcon his rationale for attacking Iran.

Speaking at a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, Thursday evening, the president suddenly claimed that part of his impetus for launching an all-out assault on the country seven months ago was because Iran was “doing drugs” at “drug factories.”

The add-on was introduced as Trump boasted about the special mission that preceded the war, Operation Midnight Hammer, in which Trump directed the U.S. military to destroy nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan in June 2025.

​“They went from Missouri and then at one o’clock in the morning, with no moon, dark as can be, these unbelievable machines led by the most incredible pilots in the world, they unloaded every single bomb, went right down air chutes into this, uh, drug factories, really,” Trump told the crowd.

“That’s what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs, but they were doing the nuclear. But these drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard.”

Trump on Midnight Hammer strikes on Iran: They unloaded every single bomb—went right down air chutes into this uhhh drug factories, really, that's what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs. These drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard pic.twitter.com/U0nY3LO315

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

It was the first time that Trump ever suggested the war in Iran was about drugs. Up until the Oklahoma rally, Trump had almost singularly blamed the conflict on Iran’s quest to develop nuclear technologies.

Before Operation Midnight Hammer took place, Tehran had argued that it was seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The nation underwent years of nuclear site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and just weeks prior the June attack was allowing IAEA inspectors to remain in the country for continuous supervision, according to the United Nations entity.

A series of historic, nationwide protests began in Iran in December 2025, sparked by the collapse of the local currency. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ensuing crackdown killed thousands of people.

When Trump first announced the U.S.-Iran war in February, he explicitly called on the Iranian people to rise up against their government and obtain their independence.

“When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said at the time. “It will be yours to take.”

But even after Khamenei was assassinated, Trump’s charge to the Iranian people did not pan out. Instead, Americans have found themselves in yet another unpopular forever war in the Middle East. The ensuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz has also roiled wallets at home, as the American economy contends with rising oil and gas prices.

President Donald Trump went all the way to Texas to trash Ken Paxton in front of his own constituents.

The president offered these comments during his rally at the Peterbilt Motors factory in Denton on Thursday night.

“He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I’ll be honest. Is he here, by the way? Oh, there he is,” Trump said of the embattled attorney general and Senate candidate. “I didn’t even know if he was here! I don’t care.”

Trump campaigns for Ken Paxton in Texas: "He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I'll be honest. Is he here, by the way? Oh, there he is. I didn't even know if he was here! I don't care." pic.twitter.com/AR9mNdSGEr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2026

During a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, later that night, Trump even went on to play the recently leaked audio of Paxton talking down on the president’s poorly received midterm GOP convention.

“It was leaked audio that came out yesterday from The New York Times saying Ken Paxton isn’t sure that the numbers after that midterm convention helped him and maybe hurt him. Are they still on board?” a reporter can be heard asking in the clip Trump played. A Trump supporter replied that Paxton was wrong.

Trump still encouraged people to vote for Paxton, “whether you love him or you don’t love him.”

Trump: We're going to send Ken Paxton to the Senate because he is whether you love him or don't love him, he's a little controversial, just slightly, but whether you love him or not, he's probably the best or certainly one of the best… pic.twitter.com/0vftPScZDb

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2026

The president pretending not to know that a Republican senatorial candidate is at his own rally is deeply unserious—especially when that candidate is locked in a contested race that has the chance to break the historic vice grip that the party has had in the state. Even if Paxton really is a pain in the ass, Trump openly admitting that isn’t necessarily a vote of confidence. And that’s something Paxton sorely needs, as his candidacy has been shrouded in controversy and a lack of enthusiasm.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

This week, word leaked that the GOP Senate candidate in Texas, Ken Paxton, privately said that Donald Trump’s midterm convention in Texas had hurt Republicans in the state. On Thursday, Trump was asked directly about this, and in a rambling monologue, he kept repeating that the convention had been a huge success and that he had won the state three times. Trump just cannot comprehend just how bad things have gotten for him there. And this inability to see his own standing clearly has itself become a major problem for Republicans.

So today we’re talking about Texas with Madison Andrus, a national official with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who’s focused on the region. We have new internal Democratic polling to share on what’s going on there. Madison, thanks for coming on.

Madison Andrus: Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to talk about, you know, all the movement that we are seeing down in South Texas. It’s truly great to see about a month out.

Sargent: It’s pretty remarkable. So the Times reported on this event where Paxton declared privately that after Trump’s convention, “everybody’s numbers dropped.” Paxton added, “right now, yeah, not good.” Now, Paxton’s campaign reacted very vehemently to this, saying it was a fake story.

Trump’s convention in Texas was on September 9 and 10. Did you guys see anything in the tracking data or in the internal polling that kind of showed how that was playing in a sort of moment-to-moment way?

Andrus: We are definitely seeing movement in the polling post this party in Dallas. You know, our DCCC internal polling from August showed Bobby Pulido beating Monica De La Cruz 49 to 43. And then just today we got new polling from the House Majority PAC that is showing Bobby Pulido up now double digits. So all of these things compounding are really leading to great momentum, and that is playing out in the data, and we’re seeing it every day.

Sargent: Yep. In fact, the House Majority PAC on Thursday found Bobby Pulido, the Democrat, leading Monica De La Cruz, the Republican, by 54 to 41. So that’s quite a significant movement. Whether that’s entirely from the convention is a little hard to say, but that really shows that something’s happening here, doesn’t it?

Andrus: Yeah, something is very much happening in South Texas, just across the board, and we are seeing great numbers. Not just in Texas 15, but, you know, our polling in Texas 34—we polled in September right before the convention, and our internals showed Congressman Vicente Gonzalez beating Eric Flores 47 to 40. You know, these are just incredible numbers for Democrats to be putting up.

And I want to point out that these are numbers that Democrats are still putting up after Republicans tried tooth and nail to rig the game at the eleventh hour with this insane mid-decade gerrymandering.

They did this because they thought that they were going to be able to lock up, you know, five, six seats for themselves, and that they wouldn’t have to fight in these seats. And now they’re losing. They are still losing after all of that. And they’re trying to pour millions of dollars into these races, and they’re not seeing a return on their investment, because they are just that unpopular.

Sargent: I want to come back to your internal polling a bit later. But first, Trump traveled to Texas for a rally on Thursday. And by the time you all listen to this, you will have probably heard something about that rally. But for now, on Thursday, Trump was asked a question by a reporter: if Paxton is privately saying you’re hurting Republicans there, why go to Texas for another rally? Here’s Trump’s answer.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Why go to Texas? Well, I’ll tell you what, we have to win this election. That convention—you were there—that convention was a tremendous success. It went up against the NFL, and as you know, they had twenty-four, I guess—it was, I said twenty-five yesterday, it was actually—they had twenty-four million views and we had a hundred and seven million views. In other words, we beat the NFL by four times. And maybe that was so for Ken, but I could tell you, we were there for a lot. First of all, I won Texas all three times. I won the Hispanic vote. I’m going because you have to thank these states that are with you a thousand percent.

Sargent: A couple things here. Note how Trump is very deeply preoccupied with thanking Texans for supporting him. I think that’s a really key tell. And same with him talking about how big a success the convention was. I mean, by that he means his own ratings. Never mind that he’s inflating them ridiculously. What he’s focused on is how he did. It’s all about how he fares in Texas. No thought whatsoever to how this is impacting Republicans there. Your thoughts on that?

Andrus: Yeah, I actually thought that that was really remarkable as well. You know, those are the numbers that Donald Trump is focused on. He’s focused on his television ratings. What he’s not focused on is the cost of gas. He’s not focused on the six dollars and fifty cents a gallon it’s taking for truck drivers to fill up their tanks.

Donald Trump on Thursday was at a Peterbilt facility where they manufacture 18-wheelers. What he did not talk about was the fact that those same truck drivers—independent truck drivers and those truck-driving companies—are now paying nearly seven dollars a gallon for the diesel fuel to put in their trucks, that is now cutting into their margins and cutting into their ability to feed their families.

The numbers that he and House Republicans are not focused on are how much the cost of health care has gone up, because they cut Medicaid last year, or because they failed to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. So now the cost of health care is spiking.

The numbers that they are focused on are their TV ratings. They’re not focused on the numbers that Americans and South Texans are talking about at their kitchen table.

Sargent: Well, I want to go back to the districts that you highlighted. There was Texas’s Fifteenth District, where Democratic challenger Bobby Pulido is challenging GOP Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz. And Texas’s Thirty-Fourth District, where the incumbent Democratic congressman, Vicente Gonzalez, is being challenged by Republican Eric Flores. The reason this region, I think, is of such great interest is because these districts abut the southern border, they have a lot of Latinos in them, they have some southern Texas counties. Some of this is in the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico.

And that region is where Trump made very big inroads with Latinos in 2024, which produced a lot of punditry about a supposed major multiracial working-class realignment. Can you talk a little bit about that region, the Rio Grande Valley, how much importance you guys are putting on it and why?

Andrus: Yeah, we are investing very heavily in South Texas, especially the Rio Grande Valley, the RGV. An article came out just a few days ago about our seven-figure investment into bringing those voters back home. Because they did swing to Trump last time around. But what Republicans mistook was that these were now going to be reliable Republican voters. And that’s just not the case.

These are voters who simply want to be able to make it to the end of the week feeding their family. These are pocketbook voters, and they are extremely worried about the economy. And so when they look back and they are now worse off than they were two years ago, they are looking for alternatives.

And they are seeing in Johnny Garcia someone who talks about being able to afford Big Red and barbacoa at the end of the week. And they’re seeing our South Texas Democrats talking about making life more affordable.

I really want to mention, Vicente Gonzalez just a few days ago actually released a new ad in the district that talked about one of these big cultural issues that is shifting Hispanic voters back towards Democrats. And that is that there are restaurants now in South Texas that are taking brisket off of their menu, because it is just too expensive, because the cost of beef has gone up by that much. That this Texas staple is now being taken off of the menu.

And so Vicente has a really great ad right now that just highlights how much prices have increased, and how much that’s hurting South Texas families and also just hurting the culture.

Sargent: Beef is becoming a cultural issue. Is that what you’re saying?

Andrus: Yeah, no, it very much is. Like, these are famous South Texas restaurants taking brisket off of the menu, which would have been unheard of just a couple of years ago.

Sargent: That’s pretty remarkable. So you discussed some of the new DCCC polling on these races. You provided these numbers to me as well. Let’s just go quickly over them again.

In Texas’s Fifteenth District, Democrat Bobby Pulido, the challenger, is leading GOP Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz by 49 to 43. And in Texas’s Thirty-Fourth District, you have Democratic incumbent Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, as we discussed, leading Republican challenger Eric Flores by 47 to 40. What’s driving those shifts?

Andrus: I think a lot of it is the economy. And you know, it sounds repetitive to say it over and over again, but it really cannot be overstated how hard Republican economic policies are hitting folks down in South Texas. You know, for you or I—and talking about the grocery prices again—for you or I, where a trip to the grocery store might be, you know, ten minutes, it’s nothing.

In these rural parts of South Texas, especially in the RGV and places like that, a drive to the grocery store can be 30 minutes each way. And so when you are thinking about how much gas costs now, to just make your weekly trip to the grocery store eats up that much of your gas budget for the month.

Sargent: Well, let’s say one more thing about these districts. Trump won the Fifteenth District in South Texas by nearly 18 points in 2024. He won the Thirty-Fourth District by 10 points. So the shift toward Trump in the Rio Grande Valley and in nearby counties was really a profound thing. It was a very big event.

Now, what is the role of Latinos in all this? We reported this week in The New Republic that in both these districts, Trump’s approval on immigration among Latinos is down in the thirties. And I’m wondering if you guys are seeing something similar. I know you keep talking about the economy. What’s driving this Latino shift for you guys? Is there an immigration component as well?

Andrus: Yeah, so I kind of want to talk about two things here, because you mentioned Trump being underwater in these districts after winning them by so much. And you know, our internal polling backs that up. In Texas 15, right now, only 36 percent of folks that we surveyed approve of the job that Donald Trump is doing. It’s 35 percent in Texas 34. So these are just abysmal numbers for House Republicans to have to try to overcome.

But then also, kind of going towards the immigration angle, I think that definitely plays a part of it. And it plays a large part because of the way it impacts everyday life down in these communities. You know, folks like Vicente Gonzalez have said for years that we needed a strong and secure border and we need safe communities. He’s been right on this issue for years and years.

But what these communities don’t want is the chaotic and terroristic enforcement that we are seeing now. They aren’t going after hardened criminals. You know, they aren’t going after the worst of the worst, like they said that they were going to. They’re picking up nuns on their way to church. They’re picking up high school students and mariachi bands. You know, Monica De La Cruz touted these young mariachi players in D.C., and then she voted for the same machine that went in and detained them.

And so I think we are seeing it just play out in everyday life for folks down there. And also, I know we’re talking about the economy a lot, but this immigration enforcement is also impacting the economy down there. Homes that once took three or four months to build are now taking eleven months, because people are afraid to go to work, because they don’t know if they’re going to be able to go home that day. Because that is who they’re picking up.

They’re picking up folks outside of Home Depot, by policy. That’s it. That’s who they want to go and get. They want to get the people outside of Home Depot, not the drug traffickers and not the dangerous criminals. They’re picking up hardworking families.

Sargent: I want to try to underscore the magnitude of the shift against Trump. Again, he won the Fifteenth District by nearly 18 points, and now his approval rating is 36 percent. He won the Thirty-Fourth District by 10 points, and now his approval rating is 35 percent. Those numbers are correct, right?

Andrus: Yep, that is correct. And you know, right next door in Texas 28, which we haven’t talked about a ton just yet, his approval numbers are even worse. Only 28 percent of the people that we surveyed in Texas 28 approve of Donald Trump.

Sargent: Well, you just brought up Texas’s Twenty-Eighth District. That’s where Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar is facing a Republican challenger, and it’s a very competitive race. Guess what? Trump won that district by 10 points as well in 2024. But now you guys have his approval in the twenties, right?

Andrus: Yeah, in the twenties. Just 28 percent of people approve of the job he is doing right now, with 60 percent disapproving. It’s just truly abysmal numbers for House Republicans to try to overcome.

And Tano Tijerina, the Republican challenging Henry Cuellar, was out at that party in Dallas on stage talking about how great things are going. Things are not going great for folks in South Texas when they are struggling to pay their bills and make it to the end of the week.

Sargent: So I understand the economy is on everybody’s minds, and it’s a really, really intense thing for a lot of people, and it’s very preoccupying. It’s at the center of all these races. But I can’t help but notice that there’s just not that much discussion of the immigration stuff on the trail.

I don’t hear that much from Bobby Pulido or from the other Democrats in South Texas. Am I wrong about that? Are they advertising on immigration in any way? And if not, why not?

Andrus: No, I actually do think you hear about it a lot from Bobby Pulido. When that mariachi band was detained, it was actually Bobby Pulido who sounded the alarm about this. He is the first person to speak out when those kids got detained. The family reached out to Monica De La Cruz’s office—the family reached out, that mariachi band. And Monica De La Cruz’s office told them that there was nothing that they could do about it, until Bobby Pulido posted about it and his post went viral.

And so I think, when it comes also to the nun who was detained just a few weeks after, it was Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez who sounded the alarm about all of this happening. And so I do think our South Texas folks are talking about this issue, but they’re talking about it in ways that it directly impacts their communities.

And I think a big part of that is that they are not going after the hardened criminals and the worst of the worst. They’re going after those kids and, you know, people just on their way to church.

Sargent: Is there a risk of overextending here by going after some of these—I want to be clear, like, I think Democrats should compete everywhere. Like, I’m thrilled that Democrats are putting huge resources into the Rio Grande Valley and going after places that Trump won by 10, 18 points. But I do want to ask, is there some risk of overextension here? Or are the resources there for contesting all these places to the degree that they need to be contested?

Andrus: We do have the resources, and we’ve shown that we have the resources to contest in these races. That’s why our polling is doing so well, because we’ve been playing in all of these places for over a year now, and we invested early in these kinds of districts, and that investment is paying off.

Look, we are not taking any voter or any district for granted. We are going to work from now until November 3 to earn every single one of those votes. And it’s especially important in Texas, where we saw this mid-decade redistricting happen to try to subvert the will of Texas voters.

I think it is critically important that people know that we didn’t just roll over and accept that. We fought, and we’re fighting, and we’re winning in those redistricted districts.

Sargent: Can I ask, is there any risk of overextension here or not?

Andrus: No, I don’t think so. And I think, you know, when you talk to folks who do the work in, you know, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and places like that, we are still laser-focused on flipping those seats, but we are also focused on expanding the battlefield and expanding the map, and delivering the largest House majority that we can come January.

Sargent: Well, you’re going to need to get those numbers up, in part because of the redistricting, which has taken a bunch off the board, really. Although maybe not, we’ll see.

Andrus: Yeah, it really hasn’t, not in the way that they thought they would. You know, Texas 35 was one of those redistricted seats, and Johnny Garcia is doing some really incredible things out there.

Sargent: Right. Just to underscore the point, Republicans redistricted Texas and they thought that they were actually creating seats that would be easier for them to pick up as well. But some of those are now in real trouble for them, right?

Andrus: No, they’re in a lot of trouble. You know, you’re seeing them having to pour millions and millions of dollars into districts that they thought that they had locked up. You know, when Republicans redrew and created this new Texas 35 district, they thought that it was a lock. What they didn’t expect was for a pissed-off sheriff like Johnny Garcia to throw his hat in the ring, because he wanted to stand up and fight for his communities. And we’re seeing that it is working. It is really resonating with people.

I mentioned that I was down in South Texas just two weeks ago with Johnny Garcia. One of the other conversations we had while we were just walking around in this neighborhood was, he went up to go talk to some guy, and he said, you know, I’ve never voted for a Democrat before in my life, but I’m going to vote for you because I remember you from the sheriff’s department. And I think that is the kind of community connections that Democrats are making in these districts all across the battlefield. And that is what is really going to deliver us these wins come November.

Sargent: OK, are you prepared to predict today that you guys are going to win Texas’s Fifteenth, Texas’s Twenty-Eighth, and Texas’s Thirty-Fourth? Again, these are districts Trump won by a lot.

Andrus: Yep. We’re going to win each and every one of them.

Sargent: Well, there you go. Madison Andrus, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you’re right.

Andrus: All right, yeah. Thanks for having me. It was a great time.

Most cheating scandals in sports boil down to numbers: Barry Bonds’s 73 home runs in 2001 (or Mark McGwire’s 70 home run campaign three years earlier); Lance Armstrong’s six Tour de France titles; the World Series won by the sign-stealing Houston Astros. The scandal currently rocking the English Premier League is no different. The world’s most popular, lucrative domestic soccer league on Tuesday released a report detailing extensive financial improprieties, “sham” contracts, and outright fraud committed by its most successful contemporary club, Manchester City. The length of the report: 40 pages. The league titles City won between the fall of 2009 and 2019, when the investigation was launched: Three, plus another five domestic trophies. But the most important number might be £900 million, which is the amount the team inflated revenues and obscured costs during that period. 

City’s most dominant stretch didn’t arrive until after 2019. Under the guidance of Pep Guardola, the greatest coach in the world, the club lost the league only once between 2018 and 2024, and won the European-wide Champions League in 2023. There are compelling reasons to believe the team’s financial improprieties stretched into that era, but in some ways that is immaterial. City’s success over a period of nearly two decades, dating all the way back to 2008, when the perennially mediocre team was purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, or ADUG—a consortium whose political and economic ties to the United Arab Emirates are so deep the team is state-run in all but name—resulted from what appears to be the most spectacular and brazen financial fraud in the history of professional sports. Every one of its titles is tainted. None of its success would have been possible without the extraordinary manipulations undertaken by its fabulously wealthy owners who transformed the team into a sporting juggernaut. 

Given the scale of the violations detailed by the Premier League, there can be no question that City’s success is illegitimate. They cheated for nearly two decades and got away with it. Then they got caught. Wherever the Premier League—and soccer writ large—goes next it has to start from that point. But that’s the tricky part: what comes next. City’s abuses get at the heart of all that ails the sport, most of which can be traced back on some level not just to greed and corruption, but to its increasing dependence on multinational corporations, private equity, and nation-states. Cataloging City’s fraud is simple—so easy, in fact, that it’s not at all clear why it took the Premier League more than seven years to do so. Untangling soccer from the forces that corrupt it is another matter altogether. 

This week’s explosive report released describes Manchester City’s fraud as a “disguised funding scheme” that allowed the team to evade financial regulations by inflating its income and hiding its expenses to the tune of nearly £1 billion between 2011 and 2019. It did so brazenly via fraudulent contracts with sponsors, many of which had close ties to team’s owners, who all just happened to include many of the most powerful people in the government and economy of the United Arab Emirates. When the ADUG purchased the team in 2009, its commercial revenues were a paltry £18 million; a decade later they had ballooned to £230 million—an increase of more than 1,000 percent. Commercial revenues from the league’s four biggest teams—Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea—increased an average of 213 percent over the same period. 

Nearly all of that money was laundered in some form. Its “sham” contracts included sponsorship deals for its most lucrative properties. City plays in a stadium named after Etihad Airlines, the aviation company whose name also graces the front of its uniforms. The UAE-based airline paid the team £67.5 million a year for those privileges. But, per the Premier League’s report, Etihad Airlines actually paid just  £8 million; the difference was covered via wire transfer by the holding company that actually owns the team. It’s all monopoly money, really: Both the soccer team and the airline are owned by groups with ties to the UAE that are so deep that they are, for all intents and purposes, state-owned. 

City continues to insist not just on its innocence, but that it has “irrefutable evidence” proving it; Etihad Airlines is reportedly considering legal action against the Premier League. Yet the allegations are so extensive, clear, and damning that there can be no doubt that its present dominance was built on, and is inseparable from, fraud on a historic scale. 

The report and the public statements that accompanied it also suggest that the Premier League means business. And yet, it’s not at all clear that the league is prepared to make the punishment fit the crime. City is in deep trouble, there’s no question. Whether or not that trouble is commensurate with the offenses committed is another matter altogether. In many ways, this is a problem of the league’s own making. City was far more successful during the seven years it took to produce the report than it was during the nearly decade-long period covered by that report. Invalidating that success would arguably also be existential, threatening to invalidate the Premier League itself. What should we now make of many of its most iconic moments: Sergio Aguero’s 2012 title-winning goal; the rivalry between Guardiola and Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp between 2016 and 2024; Kevin de Bruyne’s lobbed passes and whipped crosses, Rodri’s imperious command of possession, Erling Haaland’s impeccable finishing?

All of that is already tarnished, whatever punishment the Premier League chooses to hand down. But its problem is also—sorry—epistemological. Those moments not only defined the league, they defined many lives, my own very much included. We watched them and felt them. Invalidating them is one thing. But what would it mean if the world’s biggest sports league essentially declared that many of its most defining moments of the last two decades weren’t real? 

There are other less abstract problems, too. One is simply that, thanks to all the cheating, Manchester City is now one of the biggest teams in the most powerful league in the world. Guardiola and Rodri are gone as of the summer; de Bruyne left a year earlier. But Haaland, fresh off a breakout World Cup campaign that elevated his already superstardom to another plane, is still there, as are a host of other stars. A forced relegation, either via points deduction or other means, whether to the second division or out of the top four English leagues altogether—a punishment that has been floated—is more than fair given the extent of City’s crimes. But kicking the team out of the Premier League would not just necessitate a historic sell-off—and likely lead to some stars, including Haaland, leaving England altogether—it would diminish the Premier League itself. 

The Premier League’s emergence as a juggernaut—both in a financial sense and a sporting one—coincided, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, with the rise of Manchester City. The league has, over the past decade, become by far the sport’s most profitable league and it has done so while most superstars—Haaland being a key exception—have played elsewhere. It is rare for all six of the league’s so-called Big Six—City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham—to be firing on all cylinders simultaneously (and a strong case should be made for excising Tottenham from the club altogether) but fielding several big-spending, if not always competitive, teams does matter. Spain has two (Barcelona and Madrid, though Atletico Madrid is hovering somewhere outside that duopoly and the sea of mediocrity below it); France and Germany have one; Italian teams are presently so broke they don’t even rate on this scale. Manchester City is undoubtedly a key pillar of the Premier League’s growing economic might and stature. Does that mean that it’s too big to fail? To put it another way, keeping City in the competition would diminish the prestige of the Premier League but so would kicking them out. 

That’s a thorny problem, but it’s the league’s problem, not ours. It’s one that will ultimately be solved by the lawyers and public relations executives who have been raking in billable hours for seven years. I have little faith that it will be solved in a way that feels just and even less that it will solve the underlying issues that created it. The Premier League may solve its City problem or it may not. But it won’t lay a glove on the real problem. City’s importance to the Premier League both as a brand and as a business is the real scandal here. 

That scandal can be found in the numbers too. The £900 million in fraudulent accounting matters. So do the eight Premier League titles and 22 trophies that the team has won since being taken over by the UAE. But the really important number is the 18 years that have elapsed since that takeover. The fraud is historic, both in a financial sense and in terms of how much success it bought. But it was brazen from the very beginning. It not only required, but demanded, willful ignorance on an almost comical scale. City’s rise may have been meteoric, but the simple—publicly available—evidence always pointed to massive fraud. The team was owned by the UAE. Its stadium and jerseys were sponsored by a UAE-based airline. It rocketed from obscurity to being a brand and business ostensibly on par with Manchester United and Liverpool in a few short years. 

It was always a farce. The report released by the Premier League earlier this week details the specifics of its massive accounting sham. But the sham itself was always apparent for anyone with eyes to see. Manchester City’s rise was not inexorable, nor was it the result of a sophisticated, hidden conspiracy that required nearly a decade to unravel. Manchester City committed fraud on a massive scale primarily as a soft power project for an authoritarian nation because they were allowed to do so. The Premier League chose to look away. The team was good and the money was flowing. Questions about its finances—let alone about its ownership—were swept under the rug. As Manchester City became the best team in the Premier League, the Premier League became the most powerful league in Europe and, by extension, the world. 

Here, too, the numbers tell a story. The 2024/25 campaign was not a particularly good one for City, which finished in third place, 13 points behind champions Liverpool. But it was an excellent one for the Premier League, which not only raked in £6.8 billion in revenue, but easily outpaced its European competitors: The Bundesliga and La Liga, the other two top leagues, both brought in about £4 billion. Compare that to the 2008/09 campaign, the season the ADUG bought Manchester City: Back then, the Premier League brought in a respectable  £1.9 billion, while the Bundesliga and La Liga brought in $1.6 and $1.5 billion, respectively. The growth of the Premier League’s edge over its rivals from $300 million to almost $3 billion is perhaps the biggest story in global soccer over that period. It’s also a story that can’t be told without the biggest fraud in the history of the sport. 

President Donald Trump picked an odd political moment to remove guardrails from the private equity industry. A July poll commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform found that a 65 percent majority agreed with the statement, “We need guard rails for Wall Street firms like private equity because otherwise they maximize short term profits for themselves, cut jobs, and reduce the quality of products and services.” There was surprisingly little partisan difference on this point. A 59 percent majority of Republicans agreed with a 78 percent majority of Democrats.

The public hates private equity so much that the once-arcane phrase “private equity” (in the 1980s we called it the leveraged buyout racket) is a political hot button in this year’s midterm elections. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that nearly three times as many congressional candidates in competitive races pilloried the industry by name as compared to congressional candidates in the previous five election cycles (when the preferred term of derision was ‘big banks”). 

Yet Trump keeps removing restrictions on private equity! 

In August 2025 Trump issued an executive order to free defined-contribution pension funds such as 401(k)s to invest in private equity, and this past March the Labor Department issued a proposed regulation to do so. The Securities and Exchange Commission followed through on Wednesday by approving a proposed rule allowing retirement-fund managers to charge a larger universe of clients the sort of high-performance fees associated with private equity (typically 20 percent above a certain benchmark). Currently such fees may be levelled only on “qualified” (i.e., rich) clients, defined either as any whose net worth is $2.7 million or more (excluding their primary residence) or as any for whom the retirement fund in question totals $1.7 million or more. Under the SEC proposal, which has not been made public (summary here), average Joes would pay these higher fees while investing their retirement funds in risky private equity. What could possibly go wrong?

The lure for these average Joes is that private equity, like most investment schemes in which the buyer assumes greater-than-normal risk, can deliver greater-than-normal returns. The key word here is “can.” According to the private equity firm KKR, over the past 25 years private equity netted, on an annualized basis, a four to five percent higher return than “public equities” (i.e., stocks). But lately private equity returns have lagged the AI-torqued stock market. According to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit watchdog group, during the past three years the median return on the fifteen largest “evergreen” private-equity funds—i.e., those funds in which assets don’t get locked up, and therefore private equity’s likeliest retirement vehicle—was half the median return for the S&P 500. More traditional (and more numerous) private equity funds in which investors lock up their assets for 10 or more years have fared even worse than the evergreens. 

It’s gotten so bad that in April, the analyst Henrique Schneider of the forecasting firm GIS, wrote an obituary for the private equity industry:

The pressure to deploy vast sums of capital—a staggering $2.18 trillion in global “dry powder,” the committed but uninvested capital held by private equity, as of March 2025 —has led to a chase for deals at any price…. The industry is now sitting on a bloated inventory of an estimated 31,000 companies, collectively valued at a staggering $3.7 trillion, with a persistent and widening gap between on-paper valuations and what a rational buyer is willing to pay in the real world.

This desperation helps explain why private equity in recent years has moved into various government-subsidized sectors that a more sensibly regulated nation than ours would never allow. These include retirement homes and hospice care. The results have been just as damaging to the quality of care as you’d expect. Private equity has also invested heavily in single-family homes. Private equity’s intrusion here has inflated prices for single-family housing to such an extent that Trump told the Treasury department last January to put some brakes on it. We have, after all, a housing shortage. Congress followed through in July with a housing bill that banned for-profit entities that owned more than 350 single-family homes from purchasing any more. Private equity’s infuriating role in bumping up housing prices is the main reason the industry gets pilloried so much these days by political candidates.

Even here, though, Trump can’t resist siding with private equity. In an August 31 letter to Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director (and sometime intelligence chief) Bill Pulte, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who co-sponsored the housing bill, complained that these agencies cancelled a 30-day purchasing period that formerly gave owner-occupiers an advantage over private equity in acquiring foreclosed homes. The Trumpies just can’t help themselves.

Private equity’s desperation for new markets is why it pushed Trump (largely, it appears, through Blackstone chief executive Steve Schwartzman, who gave Republicans $40 million in 2024) to give ordinary investors greater access to private equity in the name of “democratizing” it. But there’s some question whether these ordinary investors even want it. When The Wall Street Journal surveyed investors last fall via a Harris poll, only 10 percent said they were dissatisfied with their current retirement-fund options. But the same survey found that these ordinary investors were persuadable; informed that most companies with revenue exceeding $100 million were privately held, 59 percent said sure, okay, they’d like to invest in these behemoths. Who’s going to tell them they only got invited in because the party was already over?

You’ve probably heard the term “lemon socialism” to describe government investment in a failing enterprise that, in the event of recovery, gets to keep the profits. (Many of us used that term during the 2008 financial crisis to describe the Bush administration’s bank bailout.) The Trump administration’s attempted rescue of the private equity industry is a related phenomenon, lemon deregulation. (I believe I am the first person to use this term.) Lemon deregulation works like this: Take a failing industry. Throw it a lifeline by removing prohibitions that prevent it from operating in a manner that endangers the public. Then do the best you can to ignore the damage.

Can lemon deregulation revive private equity? That’s an open question. But even if it does, the cost will be unacceptably high to people who can’t afford to risk big losses to their nest egg.  And quite apart from the substance, Trump is throwing his arms around an industry that even many Republican candidates right now are turning into a political bogeyman. Politically, he can’t afford that. Maybe this last part should be our little secret.

The biggest news during last week’s Climate Week NYC came not from the United States but from Germany, where the government of the world’s third-largest economy committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. It was the first time Germany has explicitly made such a promise, Fiona Harvey noted in The Guardian. Germany’s previous pledges, Harvey added, “were only for ‘carbon neutrality,’” an important distinction. Carbon neutrality allows continued fossil fuel use if the emissions are offset—for example, by additional clean energy or tree planting. But only a complete phaseout of fossil fuels can halt global temperature rise.

Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, hailed his state’s decarbonization efforts, saying in an interview with Covering Climate Now that California has run on 100 percent clean electricity nine out of every 10 days so far in 2026. And as the costs of solar, wind, and batteries continue to fall, while the Iran war makes gasoline and diesel more expensive, “the markets are moving in our direction,” said Newsom, who’s widely expected to run for president in 2028. “Globally, people are realizing [that clean energy] is the better option.”

An overwhelming majority of people around the world want their governments to take stronger climate action, the Associated Press noted in an article about the global oat milk company Oatly endorsing CCNow’s 89 Percent Project. “Companies should be taking much more responsibility, not only in reducing their own environmental footprint, but really working out how they can use their platform to drive a positive future,” Caroline Reid, senior sustainability director at Oatly, told the AP.

Mirroring this public sentiment, Germany and California are key members of a “coalition of the willing” that emerged from last year’s COP30 United Nations climate summit, after petrostates vetoed calls from 80-plus countries to develop a global “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels. Collectively, this coalition amounts to the biggest economic superpower on earth. In April, many of its members met in Santa Marta, Colombia, to begin discussing, in U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s words, how “to sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy.”

Journalists have a critical role to play as governments work to phase out fossil fuels. That goal can only be achieved quickly—and speed is of the essence, scientists emphasize—if countries implement genuine climate solutions and shun false ones. News coverage that makes clear how well a given policy measures up to what’s needed, as Harvey did with her distinction between “carbon neutrality” and a fossil fuel phaseout, can keep the public informed and hold policymakers to account.

France and The Netherlands are two more big economies that have released road maps to phase out fossil fuel use. If enough other countries present credible plans for doing so, it “would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview with The Guardian.

As the costs of clean energy fall, humanity is in a “final battle” against the “evil forces” trying to keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, said Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, at a Climate Week event. Scientists at Rockstrom’s institute have studied which policies significantly reduce emissions and which don’t. A paper published in Science evaluated “1,500 climate policies implemented … across 41 countries” and concluded that only 63 of them delivered significant reductions. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but getting fossil fuel prices right—by slashing subsidies and otherwise challenging what U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse calls Big Oil’s “pollute for free business model”—is essential. Complementary research the Drawdown Institute released during Climate Week highlighted a number of supposed solutions that are anything but. The institute’s list of “weak ideas and greenwashing tricks” includes carbon capture and storage, direct air capture of carbon dioxide, blue hydrogen, and corn ethanol.

A frequent topic of conversation at Climate Week was the U.S. midterm elections, which could curb President Donald Trump’s acceleration of climate breakdown if Republicans lose control in Congress, though most Democrats (with important exceptions like Newsom and Whitehouse) are saying little about climate change on the campaign trail. Considering that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people, and 74 percent of Americans, want stronger climate action, why do so many politicians practice “climate hushing”? And why do so many voters end up backing candidates who are indifferent at best to tackling climate change?

“We need to remember,” Rockstrom said, “that citizens have many other problems besides climate change, especially the cost of living. So we need to make it easy for them to choose clean energy options, and that requires good policy.” It also requires, Newsom said, talking plainly about both the dangers and the solutions to the climate crisis. Leaders need to “connect the dots” between the heat, drought, and other afflictions driven by climate change and “kitchen table” issues like the price of beef, coffee, and home insurance. “The cost of inaction,” Newsom added, “is incalculable.”

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

For the first time since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment in 1976, a death-row prisoner has survived an execution. The state of Tennessee administered two lethal injections to Christa Pike on Wednesday night. She is still “alive right now”—as of Thursday afternoon, she is at a local hospital in critical condition, one of her lawyers told reporters. He did not give a prognosis for her long-term fate.

Pike’s failed execution is the worst of its kind in roughly a decade. At least two other inmates over the last 20 years have had their executions botched and failed, but in both cases it was because prison officials had either failed to properly find a vein or set an IV line. The failure was mechanical. This time, it was pharmaceutical.

Pike’s fate is the inevitable byproduct of the Supreme Court’s turn on the death penalty over the last decade or so. The high court has created a system where states are free to more or less experiment on prisoners while they’re killing them. Prisoners have virtually no legal recourse to challenge what can appear to be indistinguishable from torture. The justices not only rubber-stamp the states’ decisions but refuse to allow lower courts to second-guess them as well.

The death penalty remains legal in more than half of the states, but it is only really practiced in a few of them. Sixteen states have executed prisoners over the past 10 years. Most of them have only executed only a few people. Just five states—Alabama, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas—account for roughly three-quarters of the 170 executions since 2020. The federal government also briefly revived capital punishment under Trump during his first term, executing 13 people between July 2020 and January 2021.

When the Supreme Court briefly abolished the death penalty in 1972, one argument by the justices was that the system before Furman v. Georgia was too haphazard and random to pass constitutional muster. Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in his concurring opinion in Furman that the old, arbitrary system of death sentences was “cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” That randomness persists today by geography rather than procedure: Some states are merely more enthusiastic for executions than others.

Christa Pike’s case illustrates that arbitrariness in other ways. A Tennessee jury convicted her in 1996 of the murder of Colleen Slemmer, an acquaintance of hers, on the campus of the University of Tennessee. It was a gruesome killing, one where Pike’s then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp carved a pentagram in Slemmer’s chest. Since Shipp was 17 years old at the time of the murder, he could only be sentenced to life imprisonent. Pike received a death sentence.

Like many death-row prisoners, Pike had a deeply troubled childhood that included stints in foster care. She mentioned that a neighbor had raped her when she was 11 years old while writing a suicide note as a teenager. When she was 15 years old, social workers removed Pike from her home after multiple reports of physical and sexual abuse by her mother’s boyfriend at the time.

Sentencing Pike to die also marked a historical milestone for Tennessee. The state had not executed a woman in more than 200 years. Between 1807 and 1819, Tennessee hanged three Black women for separate murders. Only one of them, Molly Holcomb, had a name that survived the mists of history. In her final appeals, Pike also requested to be hanged instead of receiving a lethal injection because of the likelihood of a painful and potentially botched execution.

Those fears were well-founded. A man executed last year by Tennessee with pentobarbital developed pulmonary edema in his lungs, according to an autopsy, which would have given an excruciating sensation of drowning. When the state executed a prisoner in 2019 with a modified version of the old three-drug cocktail, witnesses recalled how he had been “gasping, choking, and gurgling” after the final drug was injected.

Like many other states, it once used a three-drug cocktail that included a sedative, a paralytic, and potassium chloride to stop the prisoner’s heart. That method became unviable in the 2010s after the European Union imposed an embargo on lethal-injection drugs. U.S. drugmakers also generally refuse to distribute compounds for executions to state governments as well.

Some states simply stopped conducting executions. Others tried to get around this obstacle by sourcing drugs from under-regulated markets like India or by relying on compound pharmacies in the U.S. to procure drugs. A few tried less familiar combinations of drugs to try to achieve the same outcome. In multiple cases, this led to botched executions in the 2010s.

An Arizona prisoner gasped for air for almost 90 minutes before dying, long enough for his lawyer to confer by phone with a federal judge and the state’s lawyers about their options. Witnesses reported multiple executions in the mid-2010s where the prisoner appeared to writhe in agony as they died. Clayton Lockett, who was injected with the sedative midazolam by Oklahoma officials, groaned and convulsed for almost 45 minutes before dying.

Those botched executions prompted the Supreme Court to take up a case on Eighth Amendment challenges to execution methods. In the end, the court set a nearly insurmountable bar for death-row prisoners to challenge their methods of execution. The high court had never previously struck down a method of execution as unconstitutional. States instead abandoned old methods and introduced new ones in response to public pressure.

On the Supreme Court, another turning point came when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired from the high court in 2018. Kennedy had been the decisive vote in constraining capital punishment over the preceding two decades. Backed by his vote, the court abolished the death penalty for minors and people with intellectual disabilities and forbade states from executing people for non-homicide crimes. His replacement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has no apparent interest in following in his mentor’s footsteps.

Today, the court reflexively disposes of last-minute capital appeals without any reasoning or commentary. (Until they began wielding it for political reasons in 2016, the Supreme Court’s eleventh-hour execution docket was the most notable part of its administrative “shadow docket.”) The justices appear hostile towards death-row lawyers and anti-death penalty activists. Justice Samuel Alito even denounced “what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty” during oral arguments in the midazolam case.

In the American constitutional order, people have rights and the government has powers. Not so when it comes to the death penalty. The Supreme Court has flipped it around for the past eight years: The government effectively has the right to execute prisoners, while those prisoners’ constitutional concerns must fall on deaf judicial ears. In a 2019 case involving a last-minute appeal, Justice Clarence Thomas fumed that the court should not reward what he described as “gamesmanship” by prisoners’ lawyers.

“[The prisoner’s] strategy is no secret, for it is the same strategy adopted by many death-row inmates with an impending execution: bring last-minute claims that will delay the execution, no matter how groundless,” he wrote, joined by Alito and Justice Neil Gorsuch. “The proper response to this maneuvering is to deny meritless requests expeditiously.” Even if some death-row prisoners do file meritless last-minute appeals, the court’s practice has given the impression that they consider all of them meritless by default.

Most egregiously, the high court has also prevented lower courts from imposing their own stays of execution while they consider legal challenges. The justices faced bipartisan backlash when they allowed Alabama to execute a prisoner with only a Protestant minister available instead of the clergy of his faith—one of the clearest Establishment Clause violations of the last ten years. A lower court had suspended that execution, but the Supreme Court reinstated the original execution time while effectively lying about the prisoner’s timeline to appeal.

In Pike’s case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a temporary stay of execution on Wednesday. Pike had argued that the state’s execution method, which involved strapping her to a table while surrounded by male guards would trigger her post-traumatic stress disorder from the abuse she suffered as a child. She asked that the state instead conduct the execution with women officials to avoid Eighth Amendment problems. The state of Tennessee described her lawsuit as an “abusive, tactical delay.” The Supreme Court rejected it without comment or lengthy consideration.

If Pike survives, Tennessee will have to decide whether it will try to kill her again. (The Supreme Court ruled in 1947 that second attempts do not violate the Eighth Amendment.) It has no real alternative: Unlike other death-row prisoners in other botched executions, the state cannot simply wait for natural causes to do the job for them when a 50-year-old woman is involved. In the meantime, the states’ maladventures with lethal injection will likely continue in other states, and public opinion will continue to turn against capital punishment. No “guerrilla war” against the death penalty is necessary when the state keeps shooting itself in the foot.