The New Republic

This week, GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton privately admitted that Donald Trump’s midterm convention in Texas was a serious problem for the state’s Republican candidates. Asked about this, Trump unleashed a long, tortured monologue, and it was revealing. He kept returning to the number of viewers that he got at the convention, and kept repeating that he won Texas multiple times. He can only see this in terms of how he fared there, with no regard for GOP candidates. We think that Trump’s inability to clearly perceive his own standing with voters is a genuinely serious, far-reaching problem for Republicans. So we talked to Madison Andrus, an official with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who’s focused on the region. She shares new internal polling showing Democrats leading in key South Texas races, explains the shift away from Trump in the Rio Grande Valley and why it’s important, and discusses how broad the national map has gotten for Democrats. Listen to this episode here.

Collective action spared two men in Oswego, New York Wednesday following a multi-hour stand-off with federal immigration agents.

For seven hours, two men were trapped on the roof of a house in the central New York city as Border Patrol agents attempted to arrest them. But the agency’s efforts were upended when more than 50 people gathered in front of the house and, seemingly, rescued the men from the agents’ clutches.

The Oswego Police Department said their officers responded to the commotion after receiving complaints about a reckless driver in the area. Their investigation led them to the private residence on East Seventh Street, where Border Patrol’s Targeted Enforcement Division was attempting to apprehend multiple individuals on federal judicial warrants, according to a police statement.

The specific charges of the warrants have not yet been shared, CNYCentral reported Wednesday.

Around 5 p.m., the Oswego Fire Department arrived to provide a ladder for the pair of men to climb down. However, it quickly became clear that the men did not want to utilize the ladder, as they kicked and pushed it away from the rooftop’s edge. The fire department then decided to exit the scene, leaving the ladder behind them.

“I want to be clear that our efforts last evening were for safety first and not an effort to apprehend individuals,” said Oswego Fire Chief Paul Conzone. “Once we provided the ladder to safely assist the individuals on the roof, we cleared the scene and only returned to retrieve our ladder once the incident concluded.”

Border Patrol decided to cut their losses hours later, after which the remaining crowd decided to confront a group of broadcast journalists, throwing articles of clothing over the journalists’ camera lenses while demanding that they stop recording.

When the standoff was over, the two men had disappeared from the rooftop and escaped in waiting cars, according to CNYCentral.

“I recognize that incidents involving federal agencies can generate strong emotions,” said Oswego Mayor Robert A. Corradino in a statement Thursday. “Even so, our responsibility as a city is clear: we protect our residents, safeguard our neighborhoods, and maintain order.”

“Oswego’s strength has always been its people, and yesterday our community showed that even in challenging moments, safety and civility remain our priority,” Corradino added.

The Department of the Interior is paying more than $3 million to repair grass on the National Mall that was damaged during President Trump’s poorly-attended America 250 celebrations this summer, according to The Washington Sun. 

“TURF REPAIR FROM A250,’ reads the contract with Maryland landscaping company Custom Lawn Service Inc. The contract runs until March 2027.

The contract does not say where exactly the mall repairs will be. But Trump has been spinning tall tales about “vandals” destroying the grass  for a few months now. But that patchy, drab looking area is exactly where the main stage for his Fourth of July celebration event was. 

“Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump wrote in August. “Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!”

The $3.4 million the Interior Department is now spending is likely due to increased foot, vehicle, and equipment traffic. What kind of vandals are tearing up grass and kicking up dirt and leaving? 

Trump himself has been the cause of most of the damage around the National Mall. The Justice Department found that it was indeed Trump and his hand-picked contractors who were responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that left the monument drained and shielded by chain-link fences. Those same federal contractors were also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden.

In the past, members of the Republican Party have accused Democrats of waging a war on meat. Now, it appears that the bleeding-heart environmentalists at the Trump administration won’t stop sabotaging the beef industry.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the secretary of Agriculture and secretary of Health and Human Services to begin exploring options for adding warning labels to food that contain “significant amounts” of alpha-galactose, a sugar molecule found in most mammals.

You may have heard of that substance before because of alpha-gal syndrome, an increasingly common and potentially life-threatening food allergy to red meat that can develop from a tick bite.

The Trump administration’s new rule was framed as one way of cracking down on tick-borne illnesses—but it may end up hurting the meat industry in the process. The new rule could potentially result in meat processors being forced to slap an allergy alert on every package of mammal products, including ground beef, steaks, pork loins, lamb chops, and even dairy. Just imagine a warning: this burger could kill you!

To be clear, from a public health standpoint, the policy is potentially a pretty great idea, considering just how severe alpha-gal is. But the rule likely won’t go over well with a certain group of longtime GOP allies who are already not too happy with Trump: farmers, herders, and ranchers.

In August, the American Farm Bureau Federation criticized Trump’s plan to grant farmers and ranchers the right to slaughter and process their own meat instead of requiring that they rely on USDA-inspected facilities. Farmers also condemned Trump’s plan to import tariff-free beef, which has yet to actually bring down prices.

All of this comes as the shrinking American herd struggles to keep up with high demand, and Trump’s tariffs and military campaign in the Middle East have kept prices elevated. Farmers in the Midwest—who were once some of the president’s most steadfast supporters—say they are facing the toughest economic crisis in decades.

The only explanation for a policy that will so obviously irritate his MAGA supporters, is that it isn’t MAGA at all—it’s MAHA. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent months talking about alpha-gal without really doing anything at all, and has been an outspoken advocate for slapping warning labels on all kinds of foods. As for pleasing the rest of Trump’s base, the social media comments beneath the administration’s announcement indicate that they’re more concerned with discussing conspiracy theories about how alpha-gal started in the first place.

Whatever beef Donald Trump had with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seems to have been buried. The two had dinner on Sunday, followed by a luncheon with other CEOs who then stood together with top Republicans outside the White House. Together, they announced a “morally binding” agreement about the governance of artificial intelligence, or “super intelligence,” as Trump has rebranded those companies’ products. While Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk had purportedly butted heads with the president in recent weeks over the idea of slowing down the launch of new and more capable large language models—the executives called to “pace the frontier”; Trump disagreed—they have reached a new understanding. “We all need to work together to make sure that we can win, and we can win safely,” Amodei said, before slinking awkwardly back into the high net-worth clump of suits assembled behind him. “If we can do this right, work with the President and everyone here, we can win safely.” Trump summed up the principles of their 308-word agreement more succinctly: “tremendous self-regulation.”

Since Trump took office, pundits have marveled at the tech industry’s rightward shift. The recent explosion of discourse over “AI Safety” has reenergized that conversation, as observers question how lib-coded ostensible true believers in regulation such as Amodei—who publicly fought with the White House over the terms of its defense contracts—could make peace so easily with the avatar of the reactionary right. Perhaps his wincing at Tuesday’s press conference betrayed some inner torment. But Amodei isn’t the only self-styled do-gooder to make nice with Trump. Just a few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg—who could barely contain his glee while standing next to the president—poured well-publicized millions into liberal causes. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk cultivated their image as climate champions. It wasn’t so long ago that Sam Altman called Trump “unfit” to be president. “i guess the meme is that Dario is awkward, but it is kind of weird how eager the other CEOs are to participate in a public knee-bending ceremony like this,” tech journalist Kevin Roose marveled of Tuesday’s White House summit with Silicon Valley. “you’d hope more of them would be visibly uncomfortable!”

What explains the new coziness? The terms of the White House’s truce with tech leaders aren’t exactly mysterious. The same executives have showered Trump’s SuperPAC and pet projects with $227 million, the watchdog group Public Citizen notes. There are obvious benefits to having the administration’s enthusiastic support. But there’s more than just opportunism at work here. For as much has been made of the cultural and ideological fissures between MAGA and Palo Alto, the two camps share a common quasi-religious faith that economic growth can solve virtually every problem known to man.

And although there are certainly weirder corners of the overlapping ideologies that buzz around Bay Area offices and polycules, even top “true believers” who’ve trafficked in rationalism and effective altruism have been steadfast about their belief in growth as a somewhat mysterious but ultimately positive force that promises untold fortunes to those who choose to feed it. Way back in 2013, Sam Altman wrote an essay making the case that rapid economic growth “is not only critical for startups, but for most systems. Either you’re growing, or you’re slowly dying.”

In the essay, Altman argued that attempts to mitigate the inequalities created by the twenty-first century’s biggest growth industries (“robots”) could easily backfire. “We should understand,” he continued, “that as a consequence of technology and an economy of ideas, the gap between the rich and the poor will likely increase from its already high-seeming levels. There is good and bad to this, but we should be careful not to legislate against it, which will hurt growth.”

This kind of cold supposed truth-telling isn’t exactly novel among founders. Scottish philosopher and effective altruism guru Will MacAskill famously counseled disgraced crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried that the most effective way he could be altruistic was to make as much money as possible. The idea of “earning to give” is obviously compelling for people who would like to become wealthy, and those who see an opportunity to offer those people lucrative moral guidance. The idea has been something of a mainstay for effective altruists, who like to make up numbers to justify why fortunes that also flow to their pet causes, including “AI Safety,” are sum-positive for the cause of building a more abundant world.

To find the origins of this kind of reasoning you have to go way back. In 1889—at the height of the Gilded Age—industrialist Andrew Carnegie made the same case. “Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produce it,” Carnegie wrote in The Gospel of Wealth. That rich men had amassed such incredible fortunes testified to their “superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer” those fortunes to worthy causes. That spirit of far-sighted charity would be a cudgel against “Socialists and Anarchists” looking to upset what Carnegie saw as the natural order of things—the socialists and anarchists who also happened to be organizing at his mills. “The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free,” he wrote. “Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself.”

Preachers of today’s newfangled Gospel of Wealth ascribe utopian potential to the stuff that’s making them rich, too. Pressed to articulate the benefits of artificial intelligence—and not just its catastrophic risks—Amodei’s core argument has been that large language models will deliver not only technological breakthroughs but riches fantastical enough to save the world and solve its most intractable problems. In his long blog post last month about pacing the frontier, Amodei argued that his industry’s products “could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom.” His “dream scenario—perhaps a goal to aim for—would be 20% annual GDP growth rate in the developing world, with 10% each coming from AI-enabled economic decisions and the natural spread of AI-accelerated technologies.”

On Tuesday, Trump echoed Amodei’s excitement about LLMs’ capacity to deliver “unbelievable growth.” Faced with rising inflation, mortgage rates, and sprawling  blowback from an unpopular, illegal, and expensive war on Iran, Trump and Treasury Scott Bessent have both been adamant that the United States can simply grow its way through economic headwinds. That faith rests in large part on the men who gathered outside of the White House on Tuesday. Investments tied to the building binge on chips and data centers have accounted for about 20 percent of the United States’ economic growth this year. Frothy valuations continue to buoy the stock market and, with it, the fortunes of the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who are responsible nearly half of all consumer spending. As eager as Silicon Valley executives are to stay on Trump’s good side, Trump wants to keep them happy, too—and to appease voters angry about the risks of data centers and artificial intelligence alike. 

Trump and Silicon Valley executives, however, seem to share another core belief that helps inform this week’s “self-policing” spectacle: impunity. Given the steady drumbeat of headlines about OpenAI agents hacking into companies, nonprofits, and government agencies, it isn’t hard to imagine why self-policing is preferable to the alternatives. Altman’s 2013 ode to the powers of growth ends with some suggestions for how to increase growth, including reforming tort laws that can be used to try companies for reckless and negligent behavior. Altman writes that “legal protection is of course important, but it’s gotten so silly that it discourages innovation.” As former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan wrote this week, an unenforceable pledge is certainly preferable to being held accountable under the many laws that already exist to punish corporate wrongdoing. There’s a chance that could happen; Khan’s successor this week announced that it was investigating Anthropic, OpenAI, and other unnamed companies over the potential dangers posed by their products.

Another, potentially more likely outcome is that Trump loyalists at the FTC clear those companies of any wrongdoing. Trump, for his part, seems to believe that holding companies to existing laws and regulations—much less creating any new laws and regulations—would threaten the AI boom. The people getting rich off it are inclined to agree.

President Donald Trump doesn’t seem that concerned over whether the ongoing Iran war will hurt his party in November’s midterm elections.

At the White House Thursday, a reporter noted to Trump that his daughter-in-law Lara Trump said that the war “may threaten the midterms for you,” and asked if he agreed with her.

“Well, it’s possible, I don’t know, it should help, because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” the president replied, shrugging. “When you say, ‘Is it ok for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,’ I would say a hundred percent of the people say no, including worldwide. So when you say it that way, it would help. If you don’t say that, it could hurt.”

Reporter: Lara Trump said the Iran war could threaten the midterms for you. Do you agree?

Trump: It’s possible. It should help. pic.twitter.com/XipXht0Bql

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 1, 2026

The way Republican candidates frame the war in their campaigns is not the problem. The problem is the ongoing closures of the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on either side of the Arabian Peninsula, which have led to skyrocketing fuel prices, damaging not just the economy in the U.S., but also worldwide.

That in turn has increased inflation, making various goods and services more expensive. Fertilizer costs have gone up as a result of the war, as well as commodities such as helium and ethanol. These increased costs have been passed to American consumers, leading to Trump and Republicans polling at record lows.

The war also continues to cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress aren’t helping their own cause by refusing to end the war with legislation, while Trump flip-flops between saying peace talks are going well and making apocalyptic threats against Iran. If Trump thinks all of this doesn’t matter for voters in November, he is sorely mistaken.

Republican Representative Tom Tiffany has raised more than $26 million in his bid to become Wisconsin’s next governor, the vast majority of which appears to have come from three billionaires.

Between August 13 and September 19, the Republican Party of Wisconsin funneled more than $24 million into Tiffany’s coffers.

A good chunk of that money likely came from Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the billionaires behind the Uline packaging and shipping company, who each gave $11 million to the state Republican Party that month, according to campaign finance reports obtained by The New York Times.

A third billionaire also contributed a sizable sum to the Wisconsin Republican Party that month: Diane Hendricks, the co-founder of ABC Supply Co. Inc and the state’s largest conservative political donor.

The transfers accounted for 92 percent of all the money that Tiffany raised since the end of June, and have given him an enormous cash advantage in the final weeks of the race. By comparison, Tiffany’s Democratic opponent, Milwaukee County executive David Crowley, raised $10 million in the same time period.

Tiffany’s campaign details mark the first time since Wisconsin reworked its campaign finance rules that a candidate has been catapulted by such a small number of donors.

But it remains to be seen if the billionaire-provided funds will make a difference at the ballot box. A Marquette Law poll published Wednesday placed Crowley with a narrow lead among Wisconsin voters, besting Tiffany’s late-September odds by just one percentage point (46 percent versus 45 percent favorability).

Crowley’s chances were a hair better among likely voters, 49 percent of whom said they were planning to vote for the Democratic candidate, while 46 percent said they would vote for Tiffany. Five percent of likely voters told the pollster that they were still undecided.

President Donald Trump will be hosting the “most EXCLUSIVE DINNER IN THE WORLD” to the top purchasers of his cryptocurrency. 

The Washington Sun reported Thursday that the website for Trump’s memecoin, GetTrumpMemes.com, is offering invitations to “an evening with 3 Legends and President Donald J. Trump” for the 185 largest holders of the cryptocurrency, with the top 29 buyers scoring an invite to a “VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT” and the top four getting an 18-karat Trump-branded gold watch.

The event will be held on November 22 at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.  Invitations seem specifically made to encourage sales of the $TRUMP coin and give the president a hefty profit, and the competition to crown the biggest purchasers began Wednesday. 

Last year, Trump held a similar dinner for his meme coin at his golf club in northern Virginia, as well as another such dinner in April at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. At the Virginia dinner in May 2025, guests reportedly shelled out $148 million to gain access to the president for a substandard steak or halibut dinner, and the full guest list wasn’t made public because it was off-the-clock. 

Some of the known guests included former Los Angeles Laker Lamar Odom, Chinese billionaire and accused fraudster Justin Sun (who is now suing the president), and Vincent Liu, the chief investment officer at Taiwan-based Kronos Research.

The $2.2 billion Trump made last year mostly came from his cryptocurrency ventures, and he doesn’t appear to be letting up. The latest dinner is chock full of potential ethical violations, with the president clearly selling access to himself. But while these ventures have been lucrative for Trump, they haven’t worked out well for the people he dupes into investing. 

Trump’s crypto products have lost an estimated $4.7 billion for their investors thus far, according to watchdog group Public Citizen. It’s not clear how much guests will have to shell out to attend this upcoming dinner, but Trump’s largest meme coin account holds about $104 million worth. 

Unlike World Liberty Financial, which is owned by Trump’s sons, Trump doesn’t own the firm behind his meme coin, instead only selling the marketing rights to his name. That distance gives him some legal protection. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s ripping off investors to make bank with no fear of consequences.

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Inside Washington

On Wednesday, a party line vote of 47–41 confirmed Keith Sonderling as the head of the Department of Labor. To Democrats, it’s one step closer to advancing the Trump-era Labor Department’s anti-worker agenda.

Sonderling has served as acting secretary of labor since April, when President Donald Trump’s then–Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned in disgrace amid allegations of—among other things—travel fraud and creating a toxic workplace environment. (In September, the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General released a detailed report confirming the misconduct.)

Since Sonderling took over, he’s taken a number of actions that Democrats see as anti-worker. In May, the department rescinded an overtime rule adopted under former President Joe Biden. The department is currently trying to rescind a different Biden-era rule that addresses the classification of independent contractors. When Sonderling sat before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, in July, Democratic senators grilled him on these issues and other controversies, such as Trump’s purge of federal workers and the firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in August 2025 after a weak jobs report came out.

“You are not a bystander to this administration’s anti-worker policies and agenda,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington told Sonderling at the time.

Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who also sits on HELP, told The New Republic on Wednesday that he wasn’t impressed with Sonderling and didn’t get the sense that he would steer the department away from its overall anti-worker bias under Trump. “I’ve been very disappointed with the first flameout of the first secretary,” said Kaine. “I think the Trump administration’s Department of Labor is not really great for labor or for working people. I think it’s like a second secretary of commerce rather than a secretary of labor.”

Senators are particularly concerned about how the potential secretary of labor would approach AI in the workplace in a moment of skyrocketing anxiety about AI and AI-related job replacement. “Part of what we want to see from them is understanding what the real impact of this is on job loss [and] job transitions,” said Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, who served as her state’s secretary of labor in 1998. Data on how AI is affecting the workforce have been slim, and some lawmakers are trying to push the BLS to collect more. “How we do things at the Department of Labor needs to be modernized” to meet the AI moment, Blunt Rochester said. Meanwhile, Kaine told The New Republic on Wednesday that he wants to see the department focus on apprenticeship programs and workforce training for workers who could be affected by AI. 

So far, the Department of Labor has done a handful of things to address AI. In his HELP committee hearing, Sonderling told Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri that the department had asked the BLS to examine data on AI and the workforce, but it appears that little has yet emerged from that effort. The department launched a “Make America AI-Ready” mini course, ostensibly to teach AI literacy to workers. Labor advocates were skeptical: “Does this [training] make workers’ jobs better or safer? Will it help people who want to find a job access high-quality, union jobs?” Lauren McFerran, executive director of AFL-CIO’s Tech Institute and a former chair of the National Labor Relations Board, said to NPR in April. 

There are plenty of reasons why Senate Democrats weren’t eager to confirm Sonderling. His lukewarm response to current AI concerns appears to be just another drop in the bucket.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The rush to enact statewide policies to lower fuel prices continues. A limited rundown of some of the happenings this week: In Indiana, Republican Governor Mike Braun on Wednesday extended a suspension on the state’s gas use and excise taxes through November 4, and suspended restrictions on what dyed diesel could be used for on farms. Only two days earlier, Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom ended summer gas-blend requirements over a month ahead of schedule, while Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp temporarily suspended the state gas tax and Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a 30-day disaster declaration in order to suspend various diesel restrictions on Texas roads. Ohio lawmakers voted Wednesday to suspend the state gas tax for 90 days, which both Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy have said they support. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that Wall Street banks’ estimates for gas prices in the coming months have risen, given the dwindling chances of a peace deal with Iran. Republicans are increasingly worried that voter frustration over gas prices could fuel the so-called “blue wave” in November.

Elsewhere:

• Amid a wave of optimistic analysis and polling for Dems nationwide, Chris Pappas’s Senate race against John Sununu in New Hampshire continues to look a bit dicey. Pappas tends to maintain a narrow lead in most polls but is being wildly outspent. AP reporters Steve Peoples, Holly Ramer, and Steven Sloan see it as a sign of broader issues: “For all the Democrats’ confidence, the party’s brand remains deeply unpopular and fundraising is lagging,” they write. “The Republican advantage isn’t as egregious in New Hampshire as some other states, but it is significant. AdImpact finds that Republicans are outspending Democrats in New Hampshire $41.2 million to $35.4 million statewide.” The TNR Blue Book’s Emma Janssen previously reported on the jitters surrounding this race back in early September. 

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Reviewing the new personal consumption expenditure, or PCE, report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, released Wednesday, Groundwork Collaborative chief economist Breyon Williams says in a statement on the organization’s website that “the bleak economic picture offers little hope for Americans desperate for relief.” The report showed PCE inflation increasing 3.4 percent from August 2025 to August 2026, with the economy growing at a 2.4 percent rate so far this year.

The Natural Resources Defense Council released a statement on Wednesday coinciding with court day for the water utilities challenging the Biden EPA’s rule requiring the removal of lead pipes. “Water utilities fighting the lead rule are on the wrong side of history,” says NRDC senior strategic director for health Erik D. Olson. Members of Earthjustice, the Newburgh Clean Water Project, and the Sierra Club chimed in, as well, with NCWP’s Gabrielle Burton-Hill calling the case “outrageous and disappointing” and others pointing out the vast number of households and children that the rule will help protect from lead poisoning if allowed to continue.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted dive into Senator Eric Schmitt’s bizarre faceplant in the Jack Smith hearing this week—all while Axios was reporting “buzz” that he might be JD Vance’s running mate in 2028.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

An actually smart Missouri senator, a Democrat, was known as a vocal foe of Joseph McCarthy; was the first secretary of the Air Force; and refused to speak to segregated audiences in the Southern U.S. during a brief presidential run in 1960. Who was he? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

Ben Shapiro is making a pro-ICE movie about the murder of Renee Nicole Good. 

The Bulwark obtained a copy of a script from Shapiro’s right-wing Daily Wire media company that details an ICE raid in Minneapolis—and which spoofs the killing of unarmed protester Renee Good, who was shot four times by ICE agent Jonathan Ross earlier this year in Minneapolis. There have still been no charges filed in her killing, and her family moved to sue the Trump administration over her death on Thursday. 

The movie, titled Pawn Shop, appears to be similar to the company’s recent Run Fight Hide: Infidels, a lazy, ultraconservative fantasy that casts liberals as hysterical, “useful idiots” stopping the morally just right-wing from saving society and starred a post-cancellation Jonathan Majors. 

According to The Bulwark, this film opens with a character meant to be Good slamming her car into an ICE vehicle while other protestors try to stop them from arresting a man who is of course, revealed at the end to be an MS-13 kingpin. The Good character, named “Melanie, is described as being “fat” with “blue-hair,” is promptly shot and killed by agents. 

Melanie reacts to the drawn gun with panic...

She MASHES on the gas as she throws the car into reverse, accidentally SLAMMING Juan out of the way. He goes flying into the gutter, bleeding...

And as the car reverses, Mike FIRES TWICE through the

windshield...

The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid

mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.

Blood SPLATTERS on her PASSENGER’s (40s, female, overweight)

forehead and matching covid mask.

The ICE agents are then chased by a mob, and barricade themselves into a pawn shop; the rest of the movie seems to use that as an arena for whatever tired conservative talking points Shapiro and producing partner Dallas Sonnier have to offer. This is an almost an identical structure to Infidels, which I unfortunately reviewed last month. 

While it’s unclear when the movie will release, it has begun filming on location in Livingston, Minnesota—much to the chagrin of local residents.  

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has made serious bank off of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while simultaneously leading the U.S.-backed peace negotiations, CNN reported Thursday.

Shortly before Trump’s return to office last year, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners doubled its investment in Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv-based firm that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, as well as at least eight other companies that have seen massive gains as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.

Affinity Partners doesn’t benefit from any of these companies directly but has reaped massive rewards from its investment in Phoenix Financial. In July, Affinity cashed out a quarter of its stake for more than $340 million, which is more than five times the worth of its initial stock purchase.

Kushner himself has described Phoenix as Affinity’s “best investment,” and his firm remains the financial group’s largest shareholder, with a 7.4 percent stake worth more than $1 billion, CNN reported. Last September, Kushner told Forbes that he maintained a “very active dialogue” with Phoenix leadership, and met with them every few weeks.

Kushner has served as a top Middle East adviser during Trump’s second term and has floated his own wretched idea for what Israel ought to do with Gaza’s “waterfront property.”

Kushner’s financial entanglements are a clear cause for concern when it comes to his role as a volunteer envoy leading peace negotiations in Israel, Iran, and Ukraine, Cynthia Brown, chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told CNN.

“There are always people who profit from war or government policies. The difference is that the people profiting should not be the people making the decisions to make that policy. And that is what is happening here,” Brown said.

Kushner’s attorney told CNN that he had “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” and had “no involvement in the decision to purchase, hold or sell any of the nine companies.” They insisted that “any suggestion that Jared’s diplomatic work influenced Phoenix’s investments in the companies you identify, or vice versa, is incorrect.”

His attorney confirmed that Kushner “regularly spoke with Phoenix management about the company, broader market trends and potential strategic opportunities” this time last year, but had wound down the frequency of their meetings as he has become “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts.”

But that doesn’t mean that Kushner’s involvement through Affinity Partners isn’t a damning conflict of interest. The president’s son-in-law has previously used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East.

President Trump has been denied yet another chance to carve his name into something he didn’t make.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the Institute of Peace in a Wednesday court order temporarily preventing President Trump from placing his name onto the building—something former employees of the Institute alleged was coming in an emergency injunction last month, especially given that he had already placed his name on the building’s exterior sign (in removable letters) last December.

Beyond the naming, Trump attempted a complete hostile takeover of the Institute—using Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (and private security) to fire and escort workers out of the building in March of 2025. That takeover was blocked in federal court in May, but lifted in June. This most recent blockage will be retried in November.

Trump has been moving like some middle schooler carving his name into a desk with a pocket knife on the last day of school. He’s unsuccessfully tried to place his name on the John. F. Kennedy Center and was alleged to be looking into doing the same with Ford’s Theatre, where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The White House denies any plans to actually carve the President’s name into the Institute of Peace—an independent organization established more than 40 years ago. But Trump’s baseless, relentless claims to any old building justifies the sense of urgency accompanying the emergency injunction from the Institute’s employees.

President Trump has yet to publicly comment.

President Donald Trump is edgy with all kinds of media these days.

In an interview with Time magazine, published Thursday morning, Trump snapped at reporter Eric Cortellessa after he was asked a question about the health situation of Senator Mitch McConnell, who went missing from the Senate all summer. Trump went off on a tangent about President Joe Biden and lost it at Cortellessa, dropping an expletive.

“It was a disappointment to a lot of Republicans. So that’s just—well, Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody. He gave them to Fauci. He gave them to this. But you mean I’m not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe’s allowed to give them? This ain’t gonna be much of a story. Here we are doing this. You haven’t asked me one fucking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative,” Trump said.

In the same stream of thought, Trump complained that Cortellessa hadn’t asked him about Venezuela, even though he had, at length, earlier in the interview.

“Do you notice you haven’t asked me a question about Venezuela?” Trump asked, to which Cortellessa said, “We did earlier.” Trump replied, “No, no, I brought it up, and then you said—”

“You beat us to it. But yeah,” Cortellessa said.

Among other gems in the interview is that Trump regrets all of his Supreme Court picks, failing to remember they saved him from prosecution.

“Yeah. What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often. I was very—I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too,” Trump said.

Trump also defended his barring of Politico, CNN, and MS NOW from the White House grounds, but he seemed unclear about U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s order blocking the ban.

“Well, the court actually said that, if you look at the judge’s decision, he’s been a very anti-Trump judge, which is very interesting. But if you look at his decision, he really said process. He talked about—come back to us with process,” Trump said, to which Cortellessa noted that Kelly was a Trump appointee.

“Yeah, he was. He was. It’s one of those things,” Trump said. Cortellessa asked if Trump thought he was ignoring Kelly’s order, to which Trump claimed he wasn’t.

“I’m not ignoring his order. I’m just saying that when I don’t have to go out of my way, these people write only bad stories. When they say orders, what order? I’m not even aware,” Trump said. White House communications director Stephen Cheung interjected to note that “the judge basically ordered them to renew their access back to the White House, but that’s different than allowing the pool into the events in the Oval Office or on Air Force One.”

“He actually said to the premises of the White House?” Trump replied, dumbfounded.

The entire interview showcased Trump’s narcissism and clear cognitive decline, with him going on tangents, lashing out unprompted at critics, and complaining about the “fake news” going after him constantly. Trump loves the attention, but it’s been clear for a long time that he is unable to handle the duties and scrutiny that comes with being president.

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers has surrounded himself with people tied to the Living Word Church sex abuse scandal, but he’s not willing to publicly address the matter.

The former FBI agent dodged one such question while collecting a local endorsement in Saginaw on Wednesday, where a reporter asked why two pastors from the Living Word Church were on Rogers’s Faith Leadership Coalition, months after three elders at the church’s Midland chapter were sent to prison for sexually abusing children.

The dubious personnel inclusions involved Brian Ford of Living Word Church in Ludington as well as Tim Cross, the founding pastor of Living Word Church in Muskegon. Ford defended former pastor James Randolph at trial, before he was sentenced to at least 25 years for first degree criminal sexual conduct.

But when asked why Ford remained on his team, Rogers was suddenly much more interested in discussing left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and the commentator’s connection to Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed. (El-Sayed has worked to distance himself from Piker in recent months.)

“This is a guy that came to our students and preaching that we deserved 9/11, that’s a story,” Rogers said, according to ABC News 12. Rogers did not confirm or deny if Ford was still a member of his Faith Leadership Coalition.

He did, however, briefly address his prior connection to Cross, who resigned from Rogers’s team earlier this year after he admitted he initially did not believe the sex abuse victims.

“Our volunteers, the people that volunteer for us, one of those folks have stepped away from his volunteer work, someone is still in the faith volunteer work, we think the most important part here is about who is stepping up and who is surrogates,” Rogers told reporters.

Rogers was in Saginaw to collect an endorsement from Democratic Sheriff William Federspiel, though the local Democrats immediately rebuked Federspiel’s support. Saginaw County’s Democratic Party Chair, Brandell Adams, told ABC News 12 that Federspiel was simply a “Democrat in name” who was furthering his “track record of endorsing losing candidates.”

Democratic dreams of midterm victory are alive in Mississippi and Kansas—two states that have been conservative strongholds for decades.

Republican Senator Tim Scott admitted as much while speaking with Semafor about the Kansas Senate race between Republican Roger Marshall and Democrat Adam Hamilton on Wednesday.

“It’s a very competitive state, more competitive than I’d like to see it,” the South Carolina Senator said in a surprisingly candid comment. “But the fact of the matter is that we’re going to win in Kansas.… It’ll be closer than I want it to be.”

President Trump won Kansas by about a 16 percent margin in 2024. Kansas Democrats haven’t sent someone to the Senate in more than 90 years. Scott speaking about their once in a lifetime moment of weakness in the state speaks to both Marshall’s weaknesses as a candidate and the larger, widely unpopular Trump administration record that he and every other GOP candidate is being forced to defend.

Scott’s comment comes as Senate candidate and former district attorney Scott Colom’s campaign begins to pick up steam in Mississippi, further reaffirming that even traditionally deep blue states and districts may not be as safe as they seem.

“The wave doesn’t have to be humongous for us to capture Mississippi,” Colom said to The Washington Post. He’s met with Senate leaders Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, and Ralph Warnock. “If we try, we win these voters.… They’ve been written off, not just by Cindy Hyde-Smith but also by other people in the Democratic Party. And I’m just not going to write them off.”

While Colom and Hamilton both have uphill battles in spending and messaging, it’s clear that the tide is turning against this current iteration of the GOP. Only time will tell if the Democrats can successfully take advantage.

The family of Renee Good, the mother of three who was shot and killed earlier this year by a federal immigration agent Minneapolis, has filed two lawsuits against the United States government and several immigration officials alleging wrongful death and other violations of federal law.

The lawsuits were filed Thursday by Renee Good’s partner Becca Good, who was targeted by the Department of Justice after she filmed the fatal shooting, and Brent Ganger, Renee Good’s brother who testified about her death in front of Congress.

The first lawsuit was filed against “the United States of America,” and alleges the wrongful death of Renee Good under Minnesota law that is “predicated on the battery, assault, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligence that caused Renee’s death.”

The second lawsuit alleges a conspiracy to interfere with civil rights, and was filed against Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Good in her car, as well as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, her adviser and alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski, border czar Tom Homan, former ICE Director Todd Lyons, former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, and 10 unnamed federal agents.

Video footage of the January incident showed Good, who was blocking traffic, wave at the federal agents and urge them to “go around” her vehicle. Instead, the ICE agents swarmed her vehicle, pulling on the doors and demanding she “get out of the fucking car!” One witness even said that another officer ordered her to leave. When Good attempted to drive away from the group of officers, Ross shot her in the head at least three times.

The Trump administration was quick to argue that Good had deserved to die, but her killing sparked widespread backlash against the government’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

In the nearly 10 months since her death, absolutely nothing has come of the investigation into her killing. Federal law enforcement shut police and other Minnesota authorities out of the initial investigation. Later, Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the DOJ Civil Rights Division, made clear that she had no intention of conducting a civil rights investigation.

This story has been updated.

Did President Trump just lie about a massive investment from South Korea?

Trump announced Wednesday that South Korea had agreed to invest $200 billion in energy infrastructure, including a $54 billion investment in the long-discussed liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska—but South Korea claims they never committed to funding that project.

“What the Korean government agreed with the U.S. is that the Alaska project will proceed only if it is commercially viable,” said Kim Jung-kwan, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry and resources, according to Bloomberg.

“What was reported today went beyond what had been agreed,” he said, and expressed Seoul’s regrets to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

It’s not clear whether the Trump administration was aware that the commitment wasn’t set in stone, or if it believed it could manifest the funds by simply announcing them, or if—in true Trumpian fashion—it doesn’t care whether they’re real or not and this was all for show.

But I’ll tell you one person who definitely should care: Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, the vulnerable incumbent in Alaska’s Senate race.

“This is the project that is gonna keep our kids and grandkids in Alaska with a great bright future. This is the project that our state has been working on to try to get done for almost a half century,” Sullivan said Wednesday during a press conference in the Oval Office, adding that the project would create more than 10,000 jobs and provide low cost energy to Alaskans for 50 to 100 years. (The project has faced legal challenges from environmental groups concerned it will increase fossil fuel emissions and accelerate the climate crisis.)

Whether or not South Korea’s commitment is the real deal could potentially make or break Sullivan’s reelection campaign: Recent polls showed that Democratic challenger Mary Peltola has a slight lead on Sullivan.

This wouldn’t be the first time the president has lied about the amount of investment pouring in from foreign countries, The New York Times reported. Over the course of 2025, Trump claimed to have received up to $21 trillion in foreign investments—nearly twice the amount that the White House’s own tracking website states for foreign and domestic investments combined.

President Donald Trump blocked CNN from the White House press pool Thursday morning, continuing his feud with the network despite a court order allowing them on the White House grounds.

Trump removed CNN journalists from his upcoming trip to Texas and Oklahoma after they were scheduled to fly on Air Force One in order to report on his visit to a truck manufacturing facility in Denton, Texas, and a speech in Durant, Oklahoma. CNN was also barred from traveling with the president last weekend when he went to Tennessee.

While U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s order last week preventing Trump from blocking CNN, Politico, and MS NOW was limited to media access on the White House premises, the president’s actions Thursday are still “a blatant violation of the First Amendment and due process,” said Theodore Boutrous, an attorney representing the media outlets, in a statement.

“The White House is persisting in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing the President’s unconstitutional ‘ban on the free press’ by barring CNN from fulfilling its role as a designated television network pooler—to the detriment of CNN, its fellow pool members and, ultimately, the American public,” Boutrous’s statement said.

All three media outlets had asked a federal court Monday to continue preventing Trump from blocking their access, warning that “the White House’s words and actions leave little doubt that it will immediately reinstitute a complete ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico if allowed the opportunity.”

That was apparent last week, when Trump continued to bar media outlets from covering the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House and an official state dinner later in the day. It seems that Trump will continue to thumb his nose at the First Amendment as long as he can get away with it.

Congressional staffers were planning to take a luxury trip to Europe, complete with stops in Milan, the Champagne region of France, and a Ferrari factory in Bologna, Italy, just weeks before the midterms, organized by a top aide to House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Then, NBC News obtained the draft itinerary for the trip, which included both Republicans and Democrats, and asked Johnson’s office about it. The trip was immediately canceled.

“Senior congressional staff of both parties routinely lead staff delegations to allied countries and trading partners for parliamentary and private sector engagements to strengthen the working relationships between our countries and their key industries,” said Johnson’s office in a statement.

According to a staff memo, the reason for the trip was “to engage European and U.S. government and industry officials related to the impact of U.S. tariffs and taxes.” Such trips are not uncommon, as congressional staffers and delegations often take fact-finding trips to learn about policy issues. But this trip has some apparent warning signs, an ethics watchdog told NBC News.

“In theory, you want members of Congress and their staff to be going into the field and learning something and maybe investigating something, getting some up-close and personal understanding of the issue that they’re supposed to be legislating on. That’s probably a good use of time in a lot of cases,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, said to the news outlet.

“But what they end up being, or at least what they look like, is just a taxpayer-funded vacation to exotic locations. You’ve got the Ferrari racetrack that you get to play around on, or the Louis Vuitton gift bag you might be getting in Milan. I’m sure those are enjoyable inducements to the whole enterprise.”

According to Johnson’s office, the trip was canceled due to a schedule conflict. But Democratic and Republican staffers traveling together when there are stark, seemingly unsolvable legislative conflicts between the two parties raises eyebrows. And such a trip, when the House is out of session until the midterms, doesn’t look good at a time when Americans are struggling with the expensive cost of groceries and sky-high gas prices, and can’t afford vacations to Europe.

Republican Senator Eric Schmitt was warned that his attempt to trap former special counsel Jack Smith might be baseless—before he humiliated himself on the Senate floor anyway.

Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee warned Schmitt that the text messages he was planning to use to accuse Smith of holding secret meetings in Atlanta were “unvetted,” MS NOW reported Wednesday.

Schmitt accused Jack Smith during a hearing Tuesday of sneaking to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade, after they revealed their affair in February 2024. The Missouri Republican claimed to possess text messages proving that Smith had plans to attend an Atlanta Hawks game, but unfortunately for Schmitt, the texts were actually about Smith’s plans to attend a University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game in Maryland.

The Department of Justice shared materials with GOP staff on the Judiciary Committee ahead of the meeting, sources told MS NOW. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley’s team compiled most of the important information into a memo, but did not include the supposedly damning texts in their assessment, one source told the outlet.

Grassley did not share the texts with Democratic senators ahead of the hearing, deepening the suspicion that Schmitt’s failed “gotcha” moment was secretly engineered by the Trump administration, one source told MS NOW.

Democrats aren’t the only ones suspicious of the source of Schmitt’s viral face plant.

A senior Republican senator also believes the Trump administration was working to nail the president’s long-time foe. “I’m pretty sure the White House asked him to do it,” they told RawStory. “And, probably, the White House provided the material.”

Schmitt’s blunder would probably be another blip in the news cycle, except that it came just hours after Axios reported that the Missouri Republican was gaining “buzz” as a potential running mate for JD Vance in 2028. Clearly, somebody thought Schmitt was about to make waves, but he only made himself a laughingstock.