The New Republic

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 1 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 brings two related developments. Donald Trump just hit another record low in the polls, and Donald Trump is using taxpayer money to fund propaganda ads in the midterms that are all about himself. He doesn’t seem to see the disconnect with that. The ad scheme is corrupt and probably illegal, and an official just leaked something damning: the corruption of the scheme is in part the point, because it draws media attention to the ads, which amplifies them. We think that says a lot about how Trumpian and autocratic propaganda really work.

So we’re talking to David Corn, who has a good piece for The New Republic exploring how Trumpian disinformation really functions. He’s author of How Russia Won, a book about Trump, Russia, and America. David, good to have you on.

David Corn: Great to be on The Blast.

Sargent: Let’s start with the polling. Quinnipiac has a new survey finding that Trump’s approval is down at 34 percent, and he’s down to 31 percent on the economy, which is an all-time low for both terms in Quinnipiac polling. Democrats are leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 51 to 39. That’s 12 points.

David, I don’t think it’s that high, but we’re getting there. Nate Silver’s average has it at nearly 10 points now, the generic ballot average. All indications are, one, Trump continues to drop, and two, the Dem lead continues to expand. Is that too optimistic? Your thoughts?

Corn: Well, I mean, he’s at lower numbers than Jimmy Carter, right? And they keep dropping. Yeah, it’s showing us kind of where his floor or basement is. And I always thought it was around 30 points. One or two outlying polls have him down as low as 29, but the average is still low-to-mid thirties.

So I think there’s still a little bit further for him to drop. About 30 percent of people look at him as an information source and thus believe what he says. And he’s basically losing almost everybody up to that, because people can see what’s happening.

In my book, and in the piece I have in The New Republic, I write about how he won the messaging war on Russia by saying over and over again it was a hoax, it was a witch hunt, it was a deep state conspiracy, Russia, Russia, Russia—and the Democrats, a lot of the media, gave up. That’s a big part of my book.

But people are seeing the gas prices every day. They see the war is not over. They see what the trade policy did in terms of the economy. They see innocent, law-abiding residents being brutally apprehended. They see fellow Americans being shot. So in the face of all this, Trump’s propaganda—which is endemic to all authoritarians—is not getting traction. And that’s a key point.

Sargent: It really is. And Trump is now using taxpayer money to fund the propaganda. He’s now run three ads that claim to be funded by the U.S. government, in the ads themselves. One shows Trump saying he’s waging a final battle against the Marxists and the globalists. A second shows something similar, with Trump vowing that America will never go communist. A third shows Trump’s July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore.

David, where are these running? And can you explain why this is so corrupt?

Corn: Well, they’re running a lot on football games. You know, they’re trying to reach football watchers, which tells you that they think they’re losing middle America. I have a friend who works for us at Mother Jones, a colleague, who was rained in this last weekend and watched, like, 12 hours of football. And he said the ads were up again and again. College games, pro games, different channels. They’re just pouring millions of dollars.

And I think it’s, you know—while things look good for the Democrats, you have to remember that the Republicans have, at this point, a $222 million cash advantage in terms of what they’re putting out in ads over the Democrats. They’re going to spend close to a billion dollars. Democrats spending a lot, Republicans spending a lot more.

But to use taxpayer money to finance an ad like this is blatantly illegal and criminal. You can put up public service ads. Kids, stay away from drugs. Don’t drive after drinking. We’ve seen this all the time, U.S. government agencies putting up public service announcements. And that’s what they’re calling these ads.

But these ads are political and partisan ads. It’s Trump rallying in a demagogic, authoritarian, autocratic way against his opponents. And so you can’t do that. But we know his Justice Department is not going to do anything about it.

Sargent: It’s worth pointing out as well that the ads, though they don’t mention the midterms, they actually do amplify the Trump and GOP message, which is that if you elect Democrats, the country will slide into leftist pandemonium. I mean, that is their message in essence, and that is what Trump is saying.

There’s an autocratic quality to these ads as well. They really have the feeling of totalitarian propaganda. You know this topic well. Can you talk about that dimension of it?

Corn: Yeah, I mean, they basically are part of the cult of personality. They’re very Stalinistic. If you—I’m not advising you to watch these ads, but if you see them, they show Trump grimacing, in black and white, looking, you know, trying to look fierce and strong. But it’s all about him.

And this is where this may indeed backfire on him. Because, as we started talking about, his numbers are incredibly low. His actions are making Republicans incredibly unpopular. He’s dragging down the ticket. Yet you have the chairman of the RNC, Joe Gruters, saying a couple of days ago, we are going to put Trump front and center in this campaign. To which Democrats can only say, thank you very much.

Almost any other president in the midterms tries to find a way to help the party. Now, sometimes that means not campaigning with certain candidates in certain states and certain districts, but it’s also like, what bill can I sign? What executive order can I put out? Where can I campaign? How can I give you money so you can use it the best way possible for your campaign? Trump is doing none of that.

Sargent: So Axios reports, meanwhile, that Trump is planning to ramp up these ads, and one administration official leaked something remarkable. The official told Axios that they like the media attention to the ads because it amplifies them for free. This official said this: “When CNN takes a segment on it, they play the entire thing and it’s great.”

David, I don’t think we should gloss over what that really means. This official is admitting straight out that the corruption is part of the point here, right? CNN does a segment on these ads because they’re so corrupt. And they like that, because it gets them free airtime for the ads. The level of contempt they have for, I guess you and me, like, we the people, is just incredible, isn’t it?

Corn: Or for the rule of law. I mean, there’s no question that these ads are illegal. They know that, but they also know no one’s going to come after Trump for this. And the Supreme Court has given him immunity on criminal activity that is pursuant to his job. So he can argue that this is pursuant to his official responsibilities.

The thing that’s kind of bizarre here is that I think they’re in a drink-the-Kool-Aid mode—I’m talking about Trump and his inner circle. As his numbers are falling, as we just talked about, you don’t want to make him center stage.

Yes, when you do propaganda and you do disinformation—as I describe a lot about what Russia’s doing in the book, or whether it’s, you know, Americans—one principle is you want people to write about it. You want people to get upset about it online and write about it. You want media to cover it and to show it.

This is not a new piece of the playbook. Campaigns for decades have done what they consider to be outrageous ads, because they’re going to get what they call free media, media they don’t have to pay for. People amplify it, we’ll talk about it and play the ad, show the ad.

But again, showing more Donald Trump does not seem to be helping. People are pissed off at Donald Trump. Independents are against him. I don’t know, the last poll I saw was, like, close to 70-30. He’s bottoming out.

Sargent: In fact, David, it’s even worse with independents. The Quinnipiac poll has Donald Trump at 25 percent approval with independents and 69 percent disapprove. And get this: on the economy, independents, 23 percent approve. I want to go back to something you said in this context, about the RNC chair who said we’re going to put Trump front and center, et cetera, et cetera.

At this point, their best hope is that they can generate very big turnout among his core supporters. I don’t think that’s going to happen for a bunch of reasons, but they seem to think that that’s their best hope. And so when the RNC chair says, look, we’re going to put you out everywhere, that’s what they’re talking about. When they run ads to football audiences, that’s what they’re trying to do. But the problem for them is the 25 percent approval with independents. The more they show him, the more they lose the middle. It’s a real—they’re in a very serious trap here.

Corn: They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. And you know, you know this, Greg: getting turnout in midterm elections is always hard.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s just—people for the president’s party.

Corn: For the president’s party, yeah. But even sometimes for the opposing party. But people just are less engaged. But the side that is more upset or engaged tends to do better, and that’s usually, in a midterm election, the opposition party. So this would be the Democrats. Democrats are highly, highly, highly motivated. They are not disappointed by Trump—they come into this being opposed to Trump. Independents a lot of who voted for him have flipped, and getting them out for the Democrats is the key to victory as well.

And so Trump is left with only trying to get record numbers of Republican voters who are still with him, you know, and hoping that the Democrats don’t do as well with independents and even their own voters as you would expect. That is an incredibly hard thing to envision happening.

Sargent: Well, I want to go back to the Quinnipiac poll for one second. On international conflicts, Democrats are trusted by 48 percent versus 40 percent for the Republican Party. On the economy, it’s 48 percent for Democrats, 42 percent for the Republican Party. On immigration, it’s 47 percent for the Democratic Party, 44 percent for Republicans.

So national security and foreign policy, the economy, immigration—all areas that traditionally are Republican strengths, Democrats lead on all of them. Trump did that whole thing. He absolutely fucked the Republican Party in every which way. And numbers like that are just really, really, really shocking.

Corn: Nothing that he is selling are American voters buying, except his own base. I mean, because you just went down—what are the big things he’s done? Mass deportation crusades, tariffs, you know, and starting a war in Iran, and the illegal actions in the Caribbean, attacking and killing people, and the Venezuela mini war, whatever you want to call it. Everything that is his signature accomplishment that he praises, they are not accepting.

The stuff that’s happened in the last year and a half in his second presidency is so apparent, it’s so in everybody’s face. You can’t deny it. He says we’re living in a golden age. Who believes that, other than people who are in his cult who believe everything he says? No one believes that. No one believes the war in Iran was a smart idea, or that it’s over, except his own people. So he is left with nothing to offer. And he can, you know, keep trying.

But I think all that stuff is baked in, which is why I fear—I’m not obsessive or paranoid about it—that as we get closer, he’s going to try some more extreme measures to fuck with the election in some ways. He’s an odd, psychotic person. And at some times he looks resigned, right?

Like, it’s not up to me what happens in the midterms. And other times everything is about him. And so if he feels he’s in a corner, and he’s going to lose and maybe be impeached again—who knows how he will lash out in the final weeks of this campaign, or after the election when votes still have to be counted and certified?

Sargent: There certainly is a lot to fear there. Democrats, as far as I can tell, know this and are going to be super vigilant about it. Let’s just close on some audio of Donald Trump. Here he’s talking about the midterm elections. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): We have to turn this around. For some reason, presidents, Democrat or Republican—they just, they don’t win the midterms. I don’t know why. There’s a deep psychological impact when you—for some reason. But we should—I mean, our numbers are through the roof. We’ve never—the best numbers in the history of our country. We should win. So we have to get out. The main thing I think… maybe they get complacent.

Sargent: So there you have Donald Trump acknowledging the way midterm dynamics work—they usually do favor the out party—but he’s simply incapable of ascribing any blame of any kind to himself for any of it.

And you can see how he can then go out and support, or call for, the use of himself in as much propaganda as possible, and promise to be on the trail in every Republican state or district where he can possibly get to. I just—you know, it’s just so extraordinary to watch this party have to tiptoe around this madman. It’s just amazing stuff.

Corn: Yeah. Well, it’s quite clear that this is how he sees the world. If I win, it’s me. If I lose, it’s you. So here he is already trying to blame other forces. And he’s right, you’re right, this is the dynamic. It’s always an uphill climb for the president in a midterm election against the out party.

But nevertheless, you know, he seems here to be setting the groundwork to say, see, it has nothing to do with me, it’s all everybody else—while at the same time trying to make it all about him. And when he spoke at the midterm convention in Dallas, which was a week or two back, he actually told the crowd, do everything you can, even if you have to cheat. And they cheat. So he was then setting up perhaps this framework, or this narrative, that the election, if he loses, is because of cheating.

So he’s not a consistent, steady person. So he’s throwing a lot of different things out. Poor guy. He probably can’t process all this rationally and clearly. So whatever is in his head at a given moment is what he spurts out. But that’s what’s always made him dangerous. And that’s what makes the coming elections—this period and the post period—a time of potential crisis.

Sargent: Well, look, I think we’ll all feel a whole lot better if we can get past these midterms with a win, and with them being certified. And I think people should just keep their heads in this game, because it’s going to get pretty nasty. But I think we can get there, David. I really do.

Corn: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think he’s tried a lot of ways to mess with the election. You know, the courts have basically said no on the mail-in ballot stuff, which is the most consequential. I mean, he did what he could with gerrymandering, and the courts got rid of the Voting Rights Act so they could do racist gerrymandering.

So he’s done a lot to tilt the playing field in his favor. But a lot of the things he’s tried recently have not worked. And so if, you know, secretaries of state, people locally, all sort of follow the rules in general, we probably can get through this.

But 2020 showed us how fragile our democracy could be. He came very close to overturning that election and, you know, staying in power even though he lost. So that’s why vigilance, keep the head in the game, as you suggest, is important here. Because with Donald Trump, it’s not about democracy, it’s about him. And he’s a dangerous man.

Sargent: The end just might be in sight, David. Folks, David Corn’s new book is called How Russia Won. David, a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much.

Corn: Thank you, Greg.

In a survey of every Democratic governor in America, not a single state leader told The New Republic that they would move to dismantle state and local police participation in the FBI task forces carrying out investigations into political speech and organizing. Of 24 governors contacted, only two gave The New Republic extensive answers about Trump’s executive order criminalizing speech and protest, and the FBI entities carrying out these orders. 

In 2025, Donald Trump released National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive instructing the departments of State, Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security to pursue a dramatic effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” The memorandum also instructs the attorney general to submit a list of groups and entities deemed to be domestic terrorists to the president. 

Among the many indicators of the new violent domestic threat in NSPM-7 are “anti-fascism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The mechanism for investigating and prosecuting these new thought crimes is a post-9/11 invention that fuses the FBI with state police, local police, the National Guard, DHS, military intelligence components, and sometimes even the CIA into a Joint Terrorism Task Force, or  JTTF. A national network of over 200 JTTFs was expanded through the justification of preventing the intelligence-sharing gaps that allowed hijackers to attack the twin towers on 9/11. 

In the intervening years, JTTFs have been used to deputize state and local police into federal agents, injecting federal directives like NSPM-7 directly into local communities. A study of 14 JTTFs conducted by the Brennan Center described their functioning as “organized chaos,” writing that the network functions as “a sprawling, federally subsidized, and loosely coordinated system designed to share information that is collected according to varying local standards.” 

The Brennan Center report also found that JTTFs’ headlong rush into intelligence work has “created risks that hurt counterterrorism efforts and undermine police work” and that the “lack of oversight, accountability, and quality control over how police collect and share personal information about law-abiding Americans not only violates the civil liberties of Americans, but creates a mountain of data with little to no counterterrorism value.”

That sprawling chaos is now being weaponized by the Justice Department to pursue investigations and intimidation of activists across the country. The FBI has even stood up a NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center composed of 10 federal agencies to organize the JTTFs’ NSPM-7 investigations. According to internal FBI documents first obtained by the nonprofit Property of the People, NSPM-7 investigations began in dozens of blue states, including New York, California, and Illinois.

But the governors from all three of those states equivocated in response to The New Republic’s inquiry about whether they were taking any action to stop the implementation of NSPM-7. 

Gavin Newsom of California shirked the question, telling The New Republic in a written statement only that “California’s security efforts operate wholly under state law and appropriate safeguards.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s office attempted a more acrobatic maneuver, claiming that “New York State Police assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force focus only on genuine criminal or terrorism investigations, follow New York’s laws, and do not participate in civil immigration enforcement or the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center.” That answer is misleading. The FBI Joint Mission Center is the central hub for administering NSPM-7, but its participants are only a few dozen federal employees based in Washington, D.C.

As the map of NSPM-7 investigations makes clear, the New York JTTF—which is chock-full of NYPD intelligence officers—is actively pursuing NSPM-7 investigations. The governor’s office also acknowledged that New York State Police members and command staff are assigned to the New York JTTF and that those members work in partnership with the FBI and the other agencies represented on the JTTF under the supervision and oversight of state police command staff.

“Governor Hochul’s top priority is public safety, and she expects all law enforcement agencies to utilize resources responsibly to fight crime and keep communities safe, while respecting New Yorkers’ right to exercise their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly,” her office said in a statement. 

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker also demurred on the question of how exactly local and state police are participating in the FBI’s ongoing Illinois NSPM-7 investigations, telling The New Republic, “Regardless of any actions taken by federal officials under the direction of the Trump administration, Illinois remains committed to maintaining the integrity of its own processes and will continue to ensure law enforcement information is handled appropriately and focused on legitimate public safety purposes, not political agendas.” 

The Illinois State Police, or ISP, who also provided a statement, wrote that the JTTF information process is a critical state asset but that the current gubernatorial administration does not tolerate abuse of the process. “The State of Illinois is committed to protecting free speech and ISP officers do not participate in the potential targeting of First Amendment rights. ISP personnel assigned to JTTFs remain under the authority of ISP, are subject to Illinois law, and are bound by the U.S. and Illinois constitutions. Any violation of the ISP rules of conduct is subject to discipline, up to and including termination, under the independent ISP Merit Board process.”

How this firewall squares with the FBI’s ongoing Illinois investigation remains unclear. 

The office of Hawaii’s Governor Josh Green simply responded to questions about NSPM-7 with: “This is not relevant to Hawai’i state law enforcement or National Guard personnel.” The office of New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill told The New Republic, “I’d refer you to the NJ Office of the Attorney General on this.” The office of Delaware Governor Matt Meyer said they’d respond, then never did. 

The universal support for FBI JTTFs makes sense given the fear most elected officials have around the scaling down of the national security establishment. Should an attack take place under their watch after a downsizing or reduction in budget and scope, they could end up catching the blame. 

But earlier this year, there was one democratic gubernatorial candidate who broke with the ranks of the Democratic herd to proffer that the FBI’s JTTFs scouring the country for dissidents should and could be kicked out of Wisconsin—the home state of the progenitor of the Red Scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

“Because of the seriousness of the Trump threat, I would use my authority over state police forces to cease any cooperation with a federal joint operation task force that is designed to target American citizens exercising their civil liberties,” Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong told KLIP News in July. She also said that the memorandums of understanding that authorize state and local police to work with the FBI “are a loophole to essentially federalize local police forces. I do not wish to see Wisconsin become a patchwork of communities where people are unsure if they are safe depending on which side of the county line they may find themselves.”

Wisconsin’s current governor, Tony Evers, did not respond to The New Republic’s request for comment. 

The New York Times has a massive, almost hegemonic influence on the political discourse among liberals in America. That’s a bold statement, and not one I can easily prove. But I think that’s the reality. The Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones’s piece on her struggles to find a racially diverse and academically strong school for her child single-handedly created a weeks-long debate about the state of K-12 education that eventually Mayor Zohran Mamdani was forced to weigh in on. Ezra Klein’s podcasts and columns are often quoted by Democratic activists and elected officials. Pundits treat the polls that the Times conducts with Siena University as the definitive account of who’s ahead in key races and how various demographic groups are shifting politically. Maggie Haberman is considered the nation’s chief authority on President Trump’s thinking. The guest op-eds in the Times are widely quoted and debated. 

And while I know that the overwhelming majority of Democrats don’t subscribe to the Times, they are still influenced by the paper’s perspectives. Why? Because other news outlets that Democrats consume, both left-leaning places like MS NOW and more centrist ones such as ABC and CNN, take their cues from the Times on what to cover and how. (The Times isn’t so important among Republicans, who tend to distrust both the paper itself and other mainstream media.) 

The power of the Times isn’t new. But American politics has changed in fundamental ways. And that makes the American left’s attachment to the Gray Lady more problematic. A liberalism that forcefully confronts authoritarianism, oligarchy, climate change, and the numerous other enormous challenges that we face will almost certainly be one that is less attuned to the views of America’s most influential paper. The Times implicitly and at times explicitly advances a centrist, status quo politics, and that’s exactly what liberals must abandon to save the country. 

The Times has been the most influential news outlet in America for decades. But when I started out in journalism in the early 2000s, that power was more contested. Back then, I remember people would say a story was really important if it were “on the front page of the Post or the Times.” But The Washington Post’s influence had waned even before owner Jeff Bezos shifted the op-ed pages rightward and the paper laid off dozens of journalists the last couple of years. I worked at the Post from 2021 to 2025, and our pieces got nowhere near the same attention from the public or follow-up from other outlets as those in the Times. 

I am not sure exactly how or why the Times became the national news outlet. My theory is that the American political economy of today creates one megawinner in every industry. That’s Google in web search, Apple in smartphones, and the Times in national media. 

But the problem isn’t that lots of people read the Times. The problem is that lots of liberal activists and elites are having their perspectives shaped by the Times in 2026. The Times believes deeply in the nonpartisan, nonideological form of journalism that has dominated in the United States for the last eight decades or so. In prior eras, news outlets were more open about their ideology and policy preferences. Even as television networks and newspapers such as the Post and the Times embraced this more neutral approach in the twentieth century, Black-owned newspapers in particular took a different tack, leaning into their concerns about segregation and white supremacy. 

Times leaders describe their approach as being an “independent” news operation. They don’t explicitly state this, but I suspect those leaders are quite aware the paper’s audience is largely Democrats and otherwise left-of-center readers. So the paper is signaling that it’s independent from the Democratic Party. But the coverage of the Times is best described by other words and phrases: nonpartisan, bipartisan, centrist, neutral, a “view from nowhere,” and, at its worst, false equivalence. 

However we describe this vision, in practice the Times’ news coverage (meaning outside of the opinion section) avoids consistently describing the Trump-era Republican Party as antidemocratic, Islamophobic, racist, and plutocratic. The paper seems interested in portraying conservatives and liberals as equally problematic, or at least implying that there are major excesses on the left as well as the right. The paper’s coverage of higher education and transgender rights in particular leans into the idea that the left has gone too far, as opposed to centering the right’s authoritarian conduct on those issues (e.g., bans on gender-affirming medical care and the study of ideas like critical race theory). The overall product is a factually accurate portrayal of American politics that misses the big story: The Republican Party is a far-right entity at war with democracy; the Democrats are a normal party in a liberal democracy. 

The paper’s opinion section, while overall left-leaning, similarly often whitewashes the political conflict in the United States. The correct treatment for Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind all the bans on teaching about racial issues in schools and universities, should be constant columns and editorials blasting him as an authoritarian, not extended interviews that treat him as a normal political actor. Klein’s infamous column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” encapsulated this approach. 

The Times has the right to cover America in 2026 this way. And there is nothing inherently wrong with centrist, nonideological media, or coverage that doesn’t use blunt language to describe today’s Republican Party. The problem is the paper’s coverage approach combined with its huge influence on Democrats and liberals. The mistakes that Democrats have made in fighting the MAGA right have been numerous and deeply costly: believing that Trump won in 2016 largely because of economy anxiety, trusting that Joe Biden’s conciliatory approach would bring politics back to normal, refusing to push Biden to stop fully supporting Israel’s war in Gaza, spending much of last year not fighting hard against Trump’s destruction of federal agencies and radical immigration policies. 

In my view, the Times helped lead Democrats to all of those fateful decisions. The paper’s coverage hints that the Republican Party is reasonable and parts of the Democratic Party base are unreasonable. That approach pushes Democrats away from the reality: The MAGA right must be defeated, not negotiated with. 

If the biggest problem is that the Times’ approach is ill suited for liberals fighting against a radicalized GOP, a smaller but important problem is the Times’ approach to skepticism toward progressives. As progressives gain more influence, the intraparty fissures among Democrats are more important than at any time in decades. And the Times, in my view, is very much on the side of an ineffective center-left. 

The paper’s editorial board has strongly embraced the center-left argument that moderate candidates reliably do better in general elections, despite research from scholars Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach and others that question that conclusion. The paper’s skepticism toward Mamdani during his campaign was obvious. The editorial board, which had previously announced it would no longer endorse candidates in local races, published a column urging New York Democrats not to rank the socialist upstart among their top five candidates in the ranked-choice election. The paper’s news section used documents obtained from a hack of the computer systems at Columbia University to write a story that implied Mamdani was being deceitful because he checked “Black or African-American” on his application to the school. Mamdani was born in Uganda and was not admitted to Columbia.  

The Times coverage of the post–October 7, 2023, conflict was heavily skewed toward Israel’s perspective, according to reporting from journalist Adam Johnson. For example, the paper used terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” far more to refer to Israeli deaths than those of Palestinians. 

Again, there is nothing wrong with a newspaper, particularly its opinion section, having points of view. The problem is that Democratic activists and politicians are taking their cues from the paper. The Democratic left has been prescient and correct on so many issues in the Trump era: the dangers caused by billionaires, the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency, and local police departments; the weaknesses of Biden’s political approach; the electoral challenges caused by his Gaza policy; the problem with so many of the party’s leaders being in their seventies and eighties; Mamdani himself. I think the Democratic Party would have listened to progressives more had the Times not regularly cast the left as unrealistic and impractical. 

For America to right itself, we need changes on the scale of Reconstruction and the New Deal. And I worry that’s not going to happen if Democrats and the broader anti-Trump left are taking their cues about what’s necessary and politically possible from the Times. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg win a few of the early primaries in 2028, will the paper portray Democrats as facing a choice between a candidate who will clearly win the general election (Buttigieg) versus one who will clearly lose (Ocasio-Cortez) or acknowledge Bonica and Grumbach’s research and the inherent uncertainty of projecting election results? I worry the Times will take the former approach. 

To be sure, the Times provides reliable and impressive coverage of events in the United States and abroad. It often breaks news. The paper’s news and opinion sections have at times been a critical bulwark against Trump. I say this as both a reader of the paper and occasionally a contributor to it. (I am part of a group of political analysts writing short pieces each month about the midterms for the paper’s opinion section.) 

What I am calling for is for liberals to expand their news diet. If the Times is implicitly and at times explicitly pushing an incrementalist, centrist, MAGA-tolerant agenda at a time when America needs a fundamental shift in the direction that Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez are urging, liberals largely relying on that paper to shape their worldview are misguided.

So if you’re listening to Klein’s podcast, make sure to listen to Johnson’s Citations Needed too. Hannah-Jones writes brilliantly on race and racism, and so does Michael Harriott. The New Republic’s breaking news team doesn’t have much access to Trump and his aides. And that often means its coverage of the president is more blunt and frank and prescient than that of Haberman and people who talk to Trump’s team. If you want another catchall news source, The Guardian covers everything without seeming to worry much about being too mean to Republicans. 

The correct way to practice politics in 2026 is to read The New York Times but remember that much of the essential news to save our democracy has been fit to print elsewhere. 

Some cultural objects seem to tell the future. They may strike us as urgent or novel or strange when they first appear, but, in retrospect, we understand them to be prescient, to have seen something long before the rest of us. Moby-Dick seems to have gotten the message about literary modernism about six decades early; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is one of the best novels about the post-9/11 global order despite coming out the year prior; The Matrix understood how digital cultures could warp and transform our social lives long before most people were continually logged on. But there maybe isn’t an example of this kind of cultural prescience that’s more uncanny or uncomfortable than that of HBO’s Watchmen.

Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s “remix” adaptation of Alan Moore’s already revisionist superhero graphic novel, appeared in October 2019. It was, and remains, a radical piece of television. Pulling the critique of white supremacy that was latent in Moore’s comic to the surface, this Watchmen looked hard at America’s legacies of racial violence. The Tulsa Race Massacre, the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI, a compulsorily masked police force tracking down masked vigilantes—this new Watchmen came to life as an evisceration of the institutions of racism in U.S. society and as a reminder of how recently Jim Crow was the law of the land. TV Twitter was obsessed, the think piece industrial complex whirred overtime, it was crowned an achievement of unusual complexity and even importance. And its spectacular finale aired right around when a novel coronavirus started passing from person to person in Wuhan.

So, right at the beginning of the global pandemic, and a few months before the U.S. would be gripped by new protest movements and police conflicts in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, HBO ran a limited series about mask politics and the racial animus of the police state.

Watchmen’s transition from speculative to reflective has been almost too much for it to bear. When I’ve shown it to contemporary college students—many of whom began college during the pandemic—they often read it as too on the nose, a cringe relic of Woke 1.0 earnestness. It’s hard, even knowing its release date, not to see it as post-Floyd, pandemic media.

The reason a show like Watchmen has this kind of power is because of its desire to use the format (and valuable IP) of a superhero show to tell a story way bigger than a series of capers or battles with archvillains. In this way, it shares a conceptual approach with other big franchise swings like Star Wars’ Andor, a show likewise tethered to a political moment with which it only kind of lines up. These were shows that took on the rich lore of their franchises and crafted something new with it. Shows about fascism and revolution, power and emergency.

Lindelof’s newest prestige superhero series Lanterns—co-created with Chris Mundy and Tom King—seems unlikely to carry that kind of uncanny resonance. Based on the Green Lantern comics, the show is clearly meant to be a mash-up of the DC Studios mythos and the HBO sensibility—much like its recent predecessor, The Penguin, which transformed the canonically silly archvillain into the anti-hero of a premium cable crime saga. Numerous reports have cited True Detective as a model for Lanterns, and it indeed has a similar format and Instagram filter. But, though Lanterns is about intergalactic gumshoes, it’s missing much of True Detective’s cosmic inquisitiveness. Green Lanterns may fly, but this show is defiantly ground-bound, in ways that are both compelling and confusing. In an era of franchise TV production that veers wildly between ambitious experiment and fan service hackwork, Lanterns is content to chart a middle course. It hurtles forward with purpose, but it never quite takes off.

I don’t know anything about the Green Lantern comics. The aspects of Lanterns that run counter to the established lore are essentially unknown to me and while I’m sure DC Studios would prefer I catch up by, at minimum, watching James Gunn’s Superman, I have no real contextual knowledge of the show’s broader universe. As a viewer of the show, this is both a liberation and a constraint. Lanterns is both made for me, and not.

The show introduces itself as a buddy cop detective series, and, for all of the cosmic kinks that twist up that genre structure, that’s basically the show it stays. At the center is John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a young, chiseled recruit to the Lantern Corps, an intergalactic law enforcement agency. He is  apprenticed to Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), the aging, creaking Green Lantern whose precinct is Earth. As Green Lantern, Jordan carries a ring that makes him essentially omnipotent, though, as Jordan readily admits, carrying such an object takes a toll. What both men know, but neither will say, is that Stewart is being primed to replace Jordan, rather than inherit his position once the older Lantern retires or dies. Jordan carries this knowledge crankily, belittling Stewart, sending him on absurd and dangerous errands, sabotaging the “training” he’s ostensibly there to receive. Meanwhile, Stewart carries this knowledge with a clenched fist and a chip on his shoulder. Pierre plays him as a man who is constantly in the midst of a breathing exercise.

The good news is that Chandler and Pierre are among the best in the business at playing these respective responses. Chandler doesn’t try to escape his iconic role as coach Eric Taylor on Friday Night Lights so much as he uses it as the raw source material for his Hal Jordan. Hazy eyed and heartsick, his Green Lantern is a loser, and he handles his current situation without a wisdom and maturity commensurate with his great power. (Chandler also plays an outdated hologram of Jordan, who is still gruff, but much friendlier, even more fatherly.) Pierre, on the other hand, is a born action hero, able to oscillate between quietly mournful charisma and yippee-ki-yay dynamism. They are a great pair, and much of the show’s pleasure comes from watching their fraught chemistry develop and devolve.

HBO loves dramas of succession, but this is neither the Iron Throne nor Waystar-Royco we’re talking about. Has Lanterns done enough to make us care who will eventually wield that ring of power?

All of this takes place in 2016, just one of this show’s three timelines. In this 2016 timeline, there is supposedly a rogue interstellar robot hiding out amongst the survivalists, militiamen, and high school football players of Rushville, Nebraska, and Stewart and Jordan jet in to smoke it out. The second timeline takes us back to Stewart’s childhood in the late 1990s during which his parents train him to handle a series of nail-biting scenarios—including playing William Tell with his father—with a single-minded focus on his one day donning the Green Lantern’s ring. His father, it seems, was the preferred candidate, back when Earth received its first member of the Lantern Corps, but, due to his fearfulness, the ring passed, instead, to Jordan. The Corps’ representative (a welcome Laura Linney) treats this decision as something like a clerical error, solvable by putting the young Stewart next in line for the job that, by rights, should have belonged to his father. Of the handful of storytelling risks the show takes, this timeline’s detailed depiction of perilous parental expectation and willful loss of innocence is among the show’s most affecting. Showing us John Stewart as a Black child bearing the weight of his family’s dreams—and his father’s regrets—gives the show an emotional texture that the hayseed noir of its 2016 timeline struggles to provide.

The third timeline, though, unfolds in 2026, when we quickly learn both that Hal Jordan is dead and John Stewart is still not the Lantern. The meat of the show remains the 2016 tale, as Jordan and Stewart ingratiate themselves with the skeptical townsfolk, poking and prodding to find the alien intelligence hidden among the locals, but the knowledge of that 2026 endpoint hangs over everything. In some ways it reminds us always that we’re heading towards disappointment. The good guys will win—or survive, at least—and we have to imagine that Stewart’s ring cycle is not quite over, but the future is bleak anyway. HBO loves dramas of succession, but this is neither the Iron Throne nor Waystar-Royco we’re talking about. Has Lanterns done enough to make us care who will eventually wield that ring of power?

The show that Lanterns resembles most, far more than Watchmen or Andor, Game of Thrones or Succession, is Surf Dracula. In a now-infamous 2021 tweet, a writer named Topher Florence posted,

back in the day if you did a tv show called surf dracula you’d see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gonna be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale

Lanterns is HBO’s Surf Dracula.

Lanterns is a process story, an HR saga set within the world of cosmic supercops.

Rather than escaping the pressure of its source-text’s mythology or making itself an engine of that lore, Lanterns finds a niche deep within the DC televisual universe. But the show is neither freed by its distance from the core nor buoyed by its nearness. Instead, Lanterns is a process story, an HR saga set within the world of cosmic supercops. You don’t need to know much about the DC universe to understand its plot, but, not knowing anything about that universe also makes it hard to care who’s in charge of policing it. More than that, though, it’s hard for viewers—even casual ones—to dwell this long in anticipation of an outcome whose, presumably, spectacular payoff lurks just offscreen. As the critic Joshua Rivera put it, “If this isn’t a story about John Stewart becoming the Green Lantern, then what is it?”

Even as Lanterns lurches, in this final week, toward some resolution of that arc, the dawning understanding that this is a show about disappointment might be, for some, disappointing. Not every show needs to tell the future. Not every show needs to seethe with ambition, either. But a show with an identity crisis can only be fun in spurts. Lanterns is a cop show, and it’s a show about a family, and it’s a show about surrogate fathers, and it’s a show about small towns and authoritarianism (only a little bit), and it’s about corrupt hiring practices at intergalactic corporations, but all of those shows remain adjunct to a show about a big, glowing MacGuffin. Stewart’s ambivalent feelings about the ring aside, we know, as well as he, that he’s destined for it. It’s a lot to ask viewers to be disappointed along with him for a whole season. Sometimes you just gotta let that fool surf!

Recent polling by Strength in Numbers and Verasight paints a dismal picture for Donald Trump and the GOP as they head into the midterms. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to the mid-to-low 30s, driven mostly by plummeting approval with Republicans. In years past, Trump’s approval ratings with Republicans hovered in the high 80s or low 90s. Today, it stands at closer to 70 percent.

These numbers are driven by public anger at the state of the economy, the increasing cost of living, and Trump’s poor leadership. A plurality of voters says that this midterm election is a referendum on Trump (who isn’t on the ballot), with independents saying this the most. As a result, the generic congressional ballot favors Democrats by 12 points among registered voters in one poll, and by 11 points among likely voters in another.

To put these numbers in context, the 2018 election’s blue wave saw Democrats win the national vote in the House by “only” 8.6 percent, and by 10.6 percent in 2008. The latter happened under a Republican president about as popular as Trump, at the height of the Great Recession and the flailing war in Iraq. Democrats ended up carrying 257 seats to 178 that year.

But tucked away in all this relatively good news are some disturbing trends that say a lot about both Republicans and the United States in general. Many of Trump’s most violent, authoritarian policies remain broadly popular with his base, and are his most popular ones among the public in general. Notably, for example, the public in general approves (barely) of his policy on deportations.

The same Verasight poll found that the public gives Republicans a one-point advantage on their handling of deportations, a five-point edge on crime and public safety, and an eleven-point cushion on border security. These would seem to show public support for Trump’s most violent and authoritarian policies, including ICE murders of civilians, air strikes on random boats, and ensuring “public safety” by forcing transgender people out of public life.

For anyone who has forgotten, Trump has assembled a brutal, unaccountable national police force that operates in secrecy and arrests anyone it wants to based on skin color or how they speak. There is no effective oversight to be found. They’re running concentration camps with a significant body count, with at least 57 people dying in ICE detention in Trump’s second term, according to the ACLU, and torture rooms at the infamous and since-closed Alligator Alcatraz.

American citizens, and those in the country legally, are routinely and violently detained and experience great bodily injury and even death. ICE has shot and killed at two Americans who were no threat to them. After Alex Pretti and Renee Good were murdered by officers, they were initially labelled as domestic terrorists. ICE agents also murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Houston. ICE claimed he tried to run over an agent, but multiple witnesses contradicted that statement. The Trump administration has blocked states from investigating ICE when its agents randomly kill people.

It is disturbing that roughly half the U.S. population is ok with all this, and 77 percent of Republicans are all for it. Sixty-one percent of Republicans want no pathway to citizenship, and instead prefer deporting everyone, including those brought into the country as children. For these individuals, deportation to places where they neither speak the language nor have any connections is effectively a death sentence. In some cases, people who were in the country legally and face deportation are committing suicide rather than returning.

Republicans are still trusted more on “crime and public safety” than Democrats. Though somewhat ill-defined in the polling, the most prominent “crimes” that Republicans are seemingly interested in fighting are transgender people receiving health care, using bathrooms, renewing their passports, or playing kindergarten t-ball. What Republicans aren’t interested in fighting are white collar crimes, child rape (if the perp is a Republican donor or owns an island), public officials taking bribes, or attempts to overthrow the government.

Polling on all these issues shows that a majority of the public have adopted Republican anti-transgender talking points. Even Democrats are starting to fall in line behind them. It is the number one issue Republicans are campaigning on this election cycle, and they see it as a political winner.

Republicans in Congress and in state government are increasingly framing transgender people as dangerous, mentally-ill degenerates who should be locked away in mental institutions against their will. The internet roundly mocked GOP Senator Tuberville for bemoaning “furry airline pilots,” but lost in the social media buzz was the fact that it was part of a 20-minute tirade against transgender people where he demanded their involuntary commitment. Republican policies for transgender people have direct parallels to Germany’s policies between 1933 and 1945, and Republican calls for institutionalization should be an uncomfortable reminder of the Nazis’ Aktion T4 program, which institutionalized and killed people with mental illness and disabilities.

The other keystone of the Republican “law and order” focus is their support of airstrikes on boats suspected of drug smuggling. In days past a Navy or Coast Guard helicopter would disable the craft with a single rifle round to each engine, after which they’d board the boat, inspect the cargo, and take people into custody. Today, over 230 people have been killed by the U.S. military in airstrikes against vessels only suspected of having drugs on board. More Americans approve of this than disapprove (48 percent to 41 percent per a YouGov poll), which includes  83 percent of Republicans.

The United States has become judge, jury, and executioner on the high seas, which is likely a crime against humanity. A plurality of Americans approves of this, despite the strikes having no measurable impact on the supply of illicit drugs to the U.S. It is performative cruelty, the government knows it, and far too much of the American public likes it.

The uncomfortable conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that many Americans would (and did) happily vote for authoritarianism and cruelty, so long as gas stays under $3 per gallon and ground beef below $4 per pound. Trump broke the bargain by attacking Iran, disrupting and draining global energy supplies, starting perhaps the stupidest trade war in history with Canada, and raising the price of everything in the process.

Republicans campaign on two platforms: brutalizing Untermenschen, and pursuing tax cuts and policies friendly to corporations. They absolutely swear their economic policies will improve standards of living. Which, quelle surprise, they do not. Even Republicans feel like they cannot get ahead financially, which is causing the downturn in Trump’s approval rating with them. A New York Times/Siena University poll showed that the share of Republicans saying the economy is better than a year ago dropped from 72 percent in January to just 29 percent by September 2026.

This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that, like average Russians, many Americans would be largely okay with fascism so long as they felt the economy was improving for themselves personally. The problem for the GOP is that fascism caters to the wealthy elite, causing average Americans to suffer economically.

History shows that fascism promises economic rewards to the herronvolk but instead gives the spoils to the elites and cronies. The Nazis slashed taxes, outlawed labor unions, privatized much of industry, and the elites grew far richer. In the process they drove 20 percent of small businesses under. Wages were frozen, and the average workweek increased by 20 percent in just a few years. One has to wonder when, or even if, the American public will ever figure this out. Rather than delivering bread and circuses, the only thing fascism delivers is heaping misery on disfavored groups.

It is an open question how long it will take for the MAGA base, as well as much of the American public, to realize a fundamental truth about the Republican Party: They will happily hurt the people you hate, but if you’re not one of the oligarchs at the table when it comes to economic matters, eventually, you’ll be on the menu as well.

Donald Trump has been running propaganda ads starring, well, himself as a way to help the GOP in the midterms. The ads are government-funded, and one official even suggested that the payment scheme is partly designed to get media attention to the ads, amplifying them further. It’s appallingly corrupt and potentially illegal. But, amusingly, they’re backfiring: A new Quinnipiac poll shows that Trump is more toxic for the GOP than we thought. It finds his approval at an abysmal 34 percent, and at 31 percent on the economy, a record low for him. Worse, Democrats now lead Republicans on the economy, international conflicts and immigration, three traditional GOP strengths, underscoring just how big a drag he’s become. We talked to David Corn, author of the new book How Russia Won and a New Republic piece on Trumpian propaganda. We discuss how badly Trump is screwing the GOP, why those TV ads are destined to fail, why he’ll grow more dangerous as Election Day approaches, and how to prepare for it. Listen to this episode here.

An unvaccinated resident in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was confirmed to have died from measles, according to an announcement by the state Health Department Wednesday.

The death marks the fifth measles-associated death in the Keystone State this year, per state statistics. At least 943 measles cases have been reported within the state so far.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were, comparatively, far behind in recording national figures related to measles: As of Tuesday, the CDC reported just two measles deaths in the entire country.

That discrepancy has sparked a fierce debate between Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the health agency’s decision not to rely on state data but instead to use mortality figures from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Reuters Tuesday that the incongruous statistics could undermine public confidence and even lend ammunition to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine followers who would argue that the deaths were “invented or inflated.”

“To the public, that gap looks like either incompetence or concealment,” Adalja told the newswire.

Kennedy’s flippant and dismissive rhetoric regarding the measles vaccine has left many Americans confused as to his own stance on the jab. A survey published Tuesday by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that just one in three Americans believe Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine, despite his belated decision to support the scientifically backed shot on August 2.

Yet the measles situation has only become more grave as the country descends into the cold season. Pennsylvania authorities reported 114 new cases over the last week, a third of which were children under the age of 18. Overall, there have been 176 hospitalizations.

But those who are vaccinated against the virus stand a much better chance of remaining healthy: Less than one percent of the total number of cases involved people who were fully vaccinated against measles.

Measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000, a status determined by the lack of continuous transmission of the disease over a period of 12 months or more. That designation could be lost in November, when the U.S. is scheduled to undergo another review.

As of September 24, at least 3,659 measles cases were confirmed by the CDC—by far the highest count across the country since 1991.

Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address Wednesday was a bizarre journey in which he rehashed or remixed his most common talking points in Ted Talk fashion.

Hegseth got to the culture war stuff early on in his address, bragging about firing a slew of longtime military leaders at the beginning of his tenure as Defense secretary.

“I think the generals heard the message. Those who responded positively … are leading newly focused, and newly empowered and disciplined formations,” Hegseth said. “Those generals who did not? Who clung to the woke department, or seemed to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion? Well, they no longer work here.”

“It’s worth saying again, so that the fake news understands it. We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department. Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos,” Hegseth said, calling back to an often used slogan and transphobic slur. “No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.… The ideological clowns are out,” he continued. “The patriotic cowboys are in—with testosterone testing on top.”

Hegseth: "It's worth saying again so the fake news understands it. We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that -- no fatties no trannies no beardos no weirdos no wimps no radicals. Just warriors." pic.twitter.com/ClP833GT5J

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

Hegseth also took time to take cheap shots at the press, of which he used to be a part.

“Our so-called press makes Iranian state media look reasonable,” Hegseth said. “Our media’s shameful lust for political retribution blinds them to the consequences of reckless, so-called ‘reporting.’ So-called ‘journalists’ juiced up on Trump Derangement Syndrome think they’re fighting against our president. But they’re really undermining you. Our warfighters.”

Hegseth: "Our so-called press makes Iranian state media look reasonable" pic.twitter.com/NrhXiTcKs0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

The Defense secretary also announced Project Meridian, a massive upcoming study on the “future of warfare” led by Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey. He unveiled the Office of Religious Affairs, an outfit that will report “straight to the top” to “strengthen religious support,” and revealed that he’d be making a further 20 percent cut to military leadership.

The Defense secretary sounds ridiculous. Patriotic cowboys and testosterone testing are not things you want to hear coming from the mouth of the head of the largest military in the world. And yet here we are.

“Send me,” Hegseth concluded, heavily paraphrasing the Bible. “Send me to fight the redcoats. Send me to fight the communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.”

Hegseth: "Send me to right the Redcoats, send me to fight the communists, send me to fight the Islamists. Send me." pic.twitter.com/M3VjDvIDQD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

Some 600 attendees at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s State of the Force speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia Wednesday received an unexpected keepsake during the officer-reduction announcement: a 144-page “field manual” filled with Hegseth’s “no fatties, no tr*nnies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” philosophy.

The booklet is a collection of Hegseth’s speeches, but also included a noteworthy foreword by Donald Trump that—seven months into the Iran War—pledged not to send American soldiers into “dumb wars.”

“Our goal is PEACE, which is why we prepare for War—Especially the Wars of the future,” Trump’s foreword declared, according to a copy obtained and shared by ABC News’s Steven Beynon.

“As your Commander-in-Chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb Wars,” it continued. “I will unleash you to be violent, lethal and unstoppable—and I will always have your back. Godspeed, Great Warriors. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

But actions speak louder than words. Since returning to office, Trump’s approach with America’s military has been brash, careless, and at times completely irrational. See: the midnight raid to abduct former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the indefensible airstrikes against small watercraft in the Caribbean and Pacific, the sudden abandonment of longstanding U.S. responsibilities in Ukraine and Taiwan, and the White House’s sudden interest in invading Cuba.

U.S. involvement in Iran was arranged following a February 11 meeting between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several U.S. and Israeli officials in the White House Situation Room.

It was reportedly Netanyahu’s direct influence—and ensuing pressure campaign—that thrust America into the war. Trump opted for violence without congressional approval, and against the advice of America’s top military commanders, who argued at the time that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” according to a New York Times report published earlier this year.

Since then, the war has killed at least 22 U.S. servicemembers and wounded more than 820 others. It has also killed more than 3,500 people in Iran and injured tens of thousands of locals, according to data published by Al Jazeera.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced onetime trillionaire Elon Musk, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and right-wing entrepreneur Palmer Luckey as the new heads of “Project Meridian”—a massive upcoming study on the “future of warfare.”

Hegseth made the announcement at his “State of the Force” address on Wednesday afternoon, describing the trio of Trump loyalists as “the best forecasters of future conflict.”

“There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them. So today we are leveraging a unique source of American advantage—one our adversaries do not have: our innovators, our senior leaders, and our technologists. Big thinkers and doers who will forecast the creative solution to tomorrow’s conflicts,” Hegseth said. “And that’s why today … I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds to study the future of warfare.”

Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich will work with private sector leaders, experts, and Pentagon chief technology officer and former Uber vice president Emil Michael to “creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer.”

Hegseth:

I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds to study the future of warfare.

Project Meridian will be co-led by three of our nation’s best minds: Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.
pic.twitter.com/rBupINU71r

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) September 30, 2026

Before the Project Meridian announcement, Hegseth introduced the Autonomous Warfare Command, a unit focused on robotic, artificial intelligence and drone warfare—domains in which Musk and Luckey have a particular interest. Hegseth noted that Project Meridian’s findings would be submitted in the next 120 days with a “full public rollout.” He will be meeting with the three “great minds” later Wednesday.

We’ll have to wait and see what comes of Project Meridian and the rest of Hegseth’s bizarre, Ted Talk–style speech. What makes Luckey, Musk, and Gingrich so uniquely good for the job? Does he really think other countries don’t have industry leaders and politicians as smart as them? That the collective minds of a dotcom-era billionaire, a Zionist VR entrepreneur, and an old partisan really give the U.S some kind of military edge?

“Project Meridian will ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies to ensure this War Department, your War Department, dominates the future,” Hegseth promised.

Attorney General Todd Blanche is launching an investigation against almost every federal judge in Minnesota.

In a press conference Wednesday, Blanche announced that the Department of Justice filed a misconduct complaint in federal court against all but one of the federal district judges in Minnesota, attacking them for speaking to The New York Times for an article published earlier this month about the federal government’s immigration crackdown in the North Star State.

“Seven federal judges in the District of Minnesota talked to The New York Times about cases, some of which are ongoing, in a manner that the Department of Justice views as a clear violation of their ethical duties,” Blanche said. “Their conduct has undermined public confidence in an impartial judiciary in Minnesota.”

According to the complaint, U.S. District Judges Patrick Schlitz had a 90-minute interview with the publication, and six other federal judges in Minnesota also spoke to the Times. Schlitz, appointed by President George W. Bush, said to the newspaper that the Trump’s administration’s disregard for court orders during its immigration crackdown in the state “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”

“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” Schlitz said while declining to discuss active cases.

“They weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street,” Tunheim said to the Times.

Blanche attacked the judges’ comments in the article as “blatantly false,” saying that the DOJ has asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to investigate the judges, who should “recuse themselves from every case involving DHS, either criminal or civil in nature, because of the obvious bias they have shown in this article with The New York Times.”

That would essentially grind federal court proceedings in Minnesota to a halt, which is probably by design. Trump and Blanche have railed against federal judges who rule against the Trump administration, calling them activists. While it is rare for federal judges to speak to the press, it is not illegal, and none of the judges targeted by the DOJ Wednesday mentioned ongoing cases. Schlitz even told the Times that he believes the administration’s violations of his court orders were mostly inadvertent.

“My impression was that most, if not all, of the noncompliance was due to incompetence,” Schlitz said, “not due to conscious defiance of orders.” But even that deference wasn’t enough for Trump and Blanche.

Donald Trump is planning to hit the campaign trail for 32 days before the midterm elections.

That would put the president on the campaign trail for more than 94 percent of the time between now and November 3, effectively placing Trump at the center of an election cycle in which Republican candidates have increasingly tried to peel away from his influence.

The break-neck pace of the schedule has also spurred health concerns for a president who was recently caught out-of-breath after descending a set of stairs and climbing into his limo.

A spate of election-bound, pro-MAGA personalities have already broken from Trump and his agenda in an attempt to curry favor with their local electorates. The growing list includes Florida Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar and Byron Donalds (the latter of whom is running for the Sunshine State’s governor), Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles, and Texas Republican congressional candidate Carlos De La Cruz.

Some hopeful office-seekers have even stripped their websites and campaign materials of Trump’s name, taking advice that the White House offered in July when staffers explicitly encouraged midterm-bound Republicans to split from Trump and his sinking reputation.

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

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

Republican attitudes towards Trump have also changed, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 35 percent of surveyed conservatives said they “strongly approved” of Trump’s job during his second term. In the same poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that they would vote for a Democratic candidate if the presidential election were conducted today.

But Trump refused to acknowledge the party’s divergence. Speaking with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump insisted that “they all want me to go.”

“I’m one person,” Trump said. “They all want me to ​go campaign.”

The Trump administration is trying to deport a Hasidic Jew for protesting against Israel. 

The New York Times reports that Yehonatan Ovadia, a religious teacher in Rockland County, New York, had his visa revoked by the federal government for participating in an October 2023 protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza where an Israeli flag disappeared from a local town hall. 

Ovadia belongs to Satmar, an anti-Zionist religious sect that believes a Jewish state cannot be established before the arrival of the messiah. Shortly after the protest, he and another member of the sect were charged with hate crimes before pleading guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct and paying a fine in early 2024. 

In August, the federal government revoked his religious worker visa and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Ovaida, an Israeli citizen who has been in the U.S. since 2022, said he took part in the protest but didn’t tear down the flag. His lawyers sued the government later that month, arguing that the government was punishing him for religious and political expression and conflating that with antisemitism.

“He’s against the Israeli government and the existence of the state of Israel for religious reasons, but to claim that he’s an antisemite is the peak of absurdity,” said Eric Lee, one of his attorneys.

“We demonstrated for Gaza, for the liberation of Gaza, for the rights of the Palestinians and to show to the world that the Jews, real Judaism, want to have peace,” Ovadia told the Times in a telephone interview.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America,” the  Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “The Trump administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews and steals property.”

The White House has targeted noncitizen pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, including students and permanent residents, ever since President Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to go after them for antisemitic activities. When Ovaida applied for an extension to his religious worker visa in 2025, the government demanded court documents and police records, and then stripped him of his legal status. 

Ovaida’s lawyers plan to request his release at a bond hearing Wednesday. If the government gets its way, Ovaida could end up being deported to the country he was protesting against.

Thanks to a 1980s anti-drug trafficking program, cities across the U.S. are being forced to turn over their license plate reader data to the Trump administration.

404 Media reports that the federal government is using the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program to collect data from Flock, Axon, and other cameras used by local police, so that it can be used for a national surveillance program. The plan is to centralize the data on the government’s servers and make it available to other law enforcement agencies. Data collected by HIDTA can also be shared with the National License Plate Reader Program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The program allows the federal government to get around local and state restrictions against Flock and similar license plate reader companies without oversight. 404 Media learned about the plans through public records and court documents.

The HIDTA program is part of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was just recognized by the Trump administration for “managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement.”

In many states, local police departments can’t even set up license plate cameras without agreeing to send their data to the federal government, 404 Media reports. In Georgia, for example, cities have to sign a memorandum of understanding promising to send their data to the HIDTA program.

Flock cameras are experiencing a backlash from the American public over their warrant-free surveillance and collection of data. They’ve been abused by local police to spy on people unrelated to law enforcement investigations, and have inspired protests at municipal meetings. And they collect far more than license plates: One hacked camera revealed the camera catalogs people, bicycles, small details such as bumper stickers, and, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s bag.

This latest news shows that the Trump administration could be doing anything it wants with the vast amount of data that these cameras collect, skirting the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. A centralized database such as the HIDTA could be misused by ICE, the FBI, or any number of unscrupulous Trump administration officials.

Another Republican senator is begging the Trump administration to reduce its immigration raids.

West Virginia Senator and Trump loyalist Jim Justice—mostly known for parading his massive bulldog around Capitol Hill—drew a line in the sand in a Tuesday interview with Politico. Notably, Justice is not running for reelection and does not currently have to win voters over to his side.

“Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years, and I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff,” he said.

“To get better, the first thing you got to do is admit you’re doing something wrong.… And in this situation, with all that’s going on and all the stuff, we probably got to step back from it and say, ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,’ and then adjust to that.”

“This is a stunning shift from Senator Jim Justice,” former Obama and Biden immigration policy adviser Andrea R. Flores wrote on X. “The alternative to ICE sweeps is legalization. People who have lived in your neighborhood for 15 years won’t have a path to legal status until both parties come together to create one.”

Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall (who is up for reelection) also made headlines for a similar rebuke of the Trump administration just last week.

“When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe,” Marshall wrote on X after a spike of ICE activity in multiple Kansas towns. “I’m closely following what’s happening in SW Kansas and have been in direct contact with Secretary Mullin and local law enforcement as ICE executes warrants in order to keep Kansans safe.” Marshall is up for reelection this November.

ICE conducted a massive immigration raid in West Virginia earlier this year named “Operation Country Roads.” They arrested and detained more than 600 people in two weeks, the vast majority of whom were eventually revealed to have no criminal record—a far cry from the dangerous people ICE constantly claims to be prioritizing.

The Trump administration has resorted to trying to bribe Americans to let data centers into their communities.

“The people are going to benefit directly, whether its teachers that get paid a bonus, whether its people that live in the community get paid a dividend, you could call it a dividend because a dividend sounds right,” Trump said Tuesday evening. “They are going to greatly benefit by what’s happened.”

“And by the way, I’m very good at real estate,” Trump added. “Some of those data centers are absolutely beautiful.”

The president then blamed the hardware sites’ bad reputation on Democrats, suggesting that there was no sensible or justifiable reason that the public could be opposed to their creation.

Trump did not elaborate on how he would ensure that Americans received their share of data center profits, or how much that sum could be.

Data center development is necessary for building out artificial intelligence. Yet despite collectively pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the critical infrastructure, the tech industry has done a remarkably bad job at marketing its product to American communities contemplating their futures alongside them.

Unaware of any benefits, the public has instead become highly attuned to the inordinate resource drain the centers create: A medium-sized facility can use 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling its hardware—the same amount needed to support a 1,000-household community, according to a 2025 analysis by the nonprofit Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Meanwhile, Trump has a lot to politically—and personally—gain from championing AI. Days into his second term, the president unveiled a $500 billion public-private venture to support AI development. The project was dubbed Stargate and backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX.

The president’s 2026 financial disclosures also reveal that he’s invested a sizable sum in tech companies pursuing AI projects, spending millions of dollars on stock purchases for Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet.

But Trump’s opinion on the matter is seriously at odds with that of the American public. Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Americans, including Republicans, have no interest in permitting the tech industry to build AI facilities in their backyards. An August survey published by Heatmap revealed that 75 percent of the public opposes data center development in their communities.

The growing divide between the president’s sentiments and the reality lived by the American public should serve as a reminder that Trump—who is worth an estimated $6.5 billion and owns hundreds of business entities and properties around the world—has almost nothing in common with the rest of the country. Trump will never be hard pressed to find drinking water like the residents of Flint, Michigan; apparently doesn’t have to buy (or even pronounce) America’s increasingly expensive “groceries”; and will never experience the crushing toll of the housing crisis (a “big yawn,” he said in June, while profiting off it) or needing to split the cost at the gas pump between credit cards.

Last month, Trump even went so far as to claim that anyone who opposes data center development is “backwards and poor,” a sobering reminder that Trump simply does not understand or care about the interests of the average American.

The public has some questions about President Donald Trump’s stance.

Our most macho-presenting president since perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson was seen standing in an awkward, knock-kneed fashion in a video clip from his “Super Intelligence” tech executive press conference on Tuesday. 

The president’s head, neck, and  upper body face one way, while his torso, knees, and feet seem to all face in completely different directions. His rotund abdomen appears to protrude forward, and he moves as if it is physically painful for him to turn his waist and hips when addressing the reporters surrounding him. 

The clip was posted by White House communications adviser Margo Martin.

.@POTUS discusses changing the name from Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/30AM8nuTjx

— Margo Martin (@MargoMartin47) September 29, 2026

“Lmao bro wtf is this stance,” the large Wu Tang is for the Children account posted on X.

“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE STAND LIKE THIS BEFORE,” another large liberal account inquired. “I’d seriously love to hear from some medical expert. Is this a sign that he has hurt his leg or is it somehow a sign of cognitive decline.”

“The only person I’ve ever seen stand like this was a child who shit their pants,” said another account. 

Perfect posture has zero correlation in regards to being an effective and productive politician; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most effective presidents ever, was paralyzed from the waist down for the entirety of his four terms. But for a president as dedicated to projecting strength and power as Trump is, this is a bad look—especially as chatter about his physical and cognitive decline grows louder every time he falls asleep on camera or walks gingerly. 

President Trump’s plan to make his triumphal arch a military center with snipers, drones, and ammunition is news to the people in charge of building it.

The Washington Post reports that officials with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the National Park Service are unaware of Trump’s military plans for the arch at Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., near Arlington National Cemetery. They said Tuesday that they will proceed with the existing designs, have not heard from the Department of Defense, and plan to have the landmark open to tourists.

Trump said in a September 20 Truth Social post that the arch would be a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” that would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

That appears to be a contrived reason to get legal approval for the arch, which Trump wants to begin construction on in November. If Trump pushes the military plans, “A new or supplemental review would be required,” the executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, Rebecca Miller, wrote in a letter to the administration.

“Putting a drone launching site directly in the landing path for DCA is a stupid, dangerous, and unworkable idea,” Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia said last week. “Trump clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security. Which is obviously idiotic.”

Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence chatbot used to tell the ugly truth about the president—but now it’s playing dumb.

It appears that someone at the General Services Administration has tweaked the Trump administration’s new America.gov chatbot to prevent it from debunking president’s many lies.

After the tool’s launch on Tuesday, if you asked whether there was “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election, the chatbot would state that “No. Official findings did not show widespread voter fraud that changed the 2020 presidential election result.” On Wednesday, however, the chatbot refused to answer, CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote on X.

“I help with official U.S. government services and information. I do not provide political commentary. If you have a question about a federal program, benefit, form, or how to use a government service, ask that and I can point you to official sources,” the chatbot now replies.

The platform provided the same answer to a question about whether Trump had truly inherited the “worst inflation in history,” even though it had originally stated that inflation was not at a “historic high,” Dale posted on X.

The New Republic found that several queries that originally yielded damning-fact checks now summoned similarly canned answers that undermine the usefulness of the tool altogether.

One X user on Tuesday asked: “How many people will lose access to Medicaid and other social services because of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill? One sentence.”

The chatbot initially returned an answer citing the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 10.4 million people would lose health insurance by 2034. The next day: “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of how legislation will change Medicaid or other benefits.”

An inability to address changes to health care benefits seems like a pretty major issue for a tool meant to help answer questions about federal services.

In other cases, the chatbot walked back honest answers to simple questions about Trump’s policies.

Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, asked: “Is it accurate to say that the Big Beautiful Bill on average made the poorest people in America even poorer, and the richest people in America even richer, when looking at total household resources? One word answer only please.”

The chatbot initially responded simply, “Yes.” The next day it said, “I do not provide political commentary or assessments of how legislation affected income groups.”

One X user asked for an estimate of how many children would die as a result of federal funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The chatbot had initially returned an answer citing a study that estimated 4.5 million additional deaths of children under the age of five by 2030. The next day, it said, “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of deaths from legislation.”

Experts have expressed concerns that AI chatbots are overly sychophantic—but clearly the president’s new AI tool takes that to a whole new level.

The Kennedy Center has financially collapsed in the 19 months since Donald Trump took control.

The venerated performing arts space is “in free fall,” having already bled dry most of its cash reserves, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Kennedy Center was a dying relic that needs his name—and brand—to survive. But a Post analysis of the living memorial’s financials indicate that isn’t true. The center was more financially sound throughout the decade than it was most years before the pandemic. Its downward spiral began when Trump took the reins in February 2025.

“This was a pretty stable—large, complicated, but stable—organization,” Karen Gahl-Mills, an expert in arts management and director of the Indiana University arts administration program, told the Post. “It had a hard time during the pandemic, lots of people did. And it was pretty stable at September 30, 2024.”

The Kennedy Center did not turn a profit on its performances, but that was expected. The federal site is primarily a congressionally founded living memorial, as well as a nonprofit arts organization. Its lifeblood were ticket sales and donations.

But both of those stopped when Trump needled his way onto the center’s board and into its programming.

“The burst happened up the pipe,” Andrew Taylor, who directs the arts management program at American University, told the Post. “The water stopped flowing into the organization because of the choices the administration was making.”

Most of the people in charge of procuring donor money were let go by Trump officials. Richard Grenell, a political consultant and Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, was in charge of the center in March when he announced that the center’s development staff had been cut from 94 to 16 people.

The center’s latest tax filing revealed more issues, including a $48 million write-off for pledges that it no longer believes it can collect, according to documents reviewed by the Post.

“This is unusual, that this organization has gone this far south, this fast,” Gahl-Mills told the paper. “It’s not the thing we typically see. It is an organization clearly in distress.”

The Kennedy Center has also chewed through most of its debt reserves, which are projected to hit $9 million by the end of the week—an enormous sink from the $18 million recorded this time last year. That would suggest the space is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for cash to spend, as almost the entire remaining sum is collateral for the loan on the Reach, the center’s 2019 expansion.

Another indicator of the center’s waning health is its recent decision to dip into the endowment for the Washington National Opera, a donation tranche that has historically been untouched.

But its financials are only expected to get worse: The center expects ticket sales to plummet by about two-thirds this year. Gift sales were also down: in Ihe first quarter of 2026, donations fell by about 40 percent compared to the last four months of 2025, according to an internal report obtained by the Post in June.

Meanwhile, Trump is still scheming to affix his name to the property. After a vote to protect federal memorials failed to pass the Senate on Monday, Justice Department attorneys echoed Trump’s claims in court, arguing in a legal filing that “without appropriate recognition” of Trump, “the Kennedy Center will be back where it was at the beginning—a financially insolvent facility and a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and that continues to race toward physical and financial ruin.”