Republicans running for reelection in competitive races say Donald Trump is becoming a distraction for them on the campaign trail. CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss reportedly instructed the network to link Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. A former federal prosecutor argues that Congress could impeach Trump for murder over his boat strikes in the Caribbean that have killed hundreds of people. And Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — is now being accused of suppressing protest after it locked out administrators of the “No Kings” Instagram account on Saturday’s day of protests.

One more thing before getting to the news: the billionaires are pulling out all the stops to maintain their grip on power, and we need your help to fight back. This weekend was a prime example of how harmful billionaire ownership of the media really is: David Ellison’s handpicked editor-in-chief of CBS is going out of her way to smear a Democratic candidate in a swing state Senate race. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is trying to stop images of mass protests against the Trump regime from spreading online.

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Republicans Say Trump Making it Harder for Them to Win Reelection

There are only two weeks to go before the midterms, and Republican candidates are now saying Donald Trump keeps distracting them from their message. GOP candidates were hoping to spend the final stretch of the election cycle talking about things like the One Big Beautiful Bill, lower drug prices and the Trump accounts for kids.

Instead, candidates have had to field questions about a planned livestream of a firing squad execution (which has since been scuttled over public backlash), taxpayer-funded propaganda ads on TV and a controversial deal to import Russian diesel from Vladimir Putin’s regime. Even Republican Senator Darline Graham of South Carolina has criticized Trump for exempting Russia from a sanctions law written by her late brother, Senator Lindsey Graham.

Trump also can’t help himself from hounding members of his own party, including Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar of Florida, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, th outgoing Senator John Cornyn of Texas and longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove. One unnamed senior Republican operative anonymously confided to Politico that candidates are often learning about Trump’s moves at the same time as voters, meaning they’re “caught flat-footed a lot of the time.”

Voters are paying attention to Trump’s actions. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found 86 percent of respondents, including 80 percent of Republicans, thought it was inappropriate for the administration to use taxpayer funds to promote the president. Republicans are openly worried about the possibility of losing reliably red Senate seats in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Texas. Many are also pessimistic about keeping the House of Representatives in Republican hands as voters vent their frustration about the ongoing war with Iran and its impact on gas prices.

Allies of the president maintain his presence is necessary to drive up GOP turnout. Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said Democrats are “pouring out to the polls no matter what Trump does,” meaning Republicans have nothing to lose by putting him on the stump. A recent Pew Research survey found Democrats were 17 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say they’re “extremely motivated” to vote on November 3.

Congress passed the Hatch Act back in 1939 because Americans were united against the prospect of a federal government spending their tax money to promote the man at the top. When even 80 percent of Republicans agree with that viewpoint, the problem is no longer with campaign messaging, but with the president who thinks the U.S. Treasury is his own personal bank account.

Bari Weiss Instructed CBS Reporters to Link El-Sayed to Muslim Brotherhood

This next one is a great example of why billionaire ownership of the media is so toxic for democracy. Semafor is now reporting that CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss — the right-wing opinion columnist handpicked by billionaire owner David Ellison to run one of the biggest newsrooms in the world — has repeatedly urged reporters to find anything that may link Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. Apparently the whole thing traces back to a 2012 tweet from his half-sister about their mother’s Egyptian activism in the early 1970s.

Weiss reportedly brought it up on several editorial calls and even assigned the network’s investigative team comb through El-Sayed’s background. It’s still not clear whether anything new will be revealed in stories to come. Some CBS staffers accuse Weiss of routinely chasing down conspiracy theories about Democratic candidates that proliferate on social media or that originate in far-right outlets. This includes a widely debunked rumor that Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was in a mental health facility in Ohio when he was actually just recovering from the flu at his home in Texas.

El-Sayed has continued to deny having any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. His supporters liken the talking point to a thinly disguised form of Islamophobia. El-Sayed — who Raw America interviewed in April — told Semafor his parents divorced when he was three and that he didn’t see his mother for years. He’s asking Michiganders to judge him by his long body of work as a doctor and public health advocate rather than because he “might pray differently than anybody who’s ever held this office.”

Article VI of the Constitution makes it clear that there will never be any religious test required for any candidate running for office. The men who authored it had just lived through centuries of Europe ripping itself to pieces over religious feuds. When the head of a newsroom whose reporting regularly reaches tens of millions of people uses the network’s resources to put a Muslim candidate’s mother’s politics from 50 years ago under the microscope, she’s conducting the exact kind of religious test the founders wanted to eliminate.

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Congress Could Charge Trump for Murdering People in the Caribbean

Former federal prosecutor Frank Bowman spent over six years pursuing drug smugglers in Miami. He’s now arguing in a new essay for Slate that the Trump administration’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific are acts of murder that Congress should view as impeachable offenses.

Since September of last year, the U.S. military has carried out strikes against 70 suspected drug boats, killing 234 people as of September 2026. There was never any attempt to stop the boats and search them for drugs or to arrest the people on board. In one infamous strike, the military conducted a subsequent strike to kill survivors of the first strike who were clinging to floating debris.

Bowman wrote that throughout his career, he’s watched infrared footage nearly identical to the boat strikes — except the videos he watched ended with arrests and trials. The clips that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sharing on social media end in explosions. Bowman didn’t hold back, calling them “official snuff films.”

Both federal law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice make it clear that unlawful killings on the high seas qualify as murder. Just as police can’t use deadly force on a suspect who isn’t posing a threat, neither can the military blow up boats that don’t appear to be threatening anyone. A United Nations report also alleged the strikes could be viewed as crimes against humanity.

The Trump administration is claiming the boats carry fentanyl, even though most of the fentanyl in America comes from Mexico, while these boats come from South America. And Trump bombing the boats over alleged drug activity is undermined by his pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted of helping to traffic roughly 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Because the Supreme Court’s 2024 Trump v. United States ruling grants Trump criminal immunity from all official acts, impeachment may be the only measure of accountability that’s still on the table. But because roughly half of the American public supports the strikes, Bowman is suggesting that a new Congress first conduct a public investigation and only add the impeachment charge if public opinion turns against the administration.

During the Nuremberg Trials, American prosecutors established that killing people who pose no threat and could have instead been captured is a crime, and that simply following orders isn’t a valid excuse for murder. Back then, we hanged the men who did it. But 80 years later, an American president is not only directly ordering killings, but posting the footage of it for social media clout. The question remaining is whether America still believes in the rules it once wrote for the rest of the world.

Meta Slammed for Cutting Off ‘No Kings’ Instagram Account on Day of Protest

Our last story this morning: Meta is being accused of deliberately suspending the No Kings movement’s Instagram account during Saturday’s national day of action. There were protests and rallies in roughly 3,000 cities and towns across the country to urge Americans to vote early. Administrators were aiming to post images and videos of the protests to spread the word. Instead, they were locked out for the better part of the day.

Meta first attributed the outage to an automated error. But later, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said Instagram’s internal security systems flagged an AI tool apparently reading profiles, posts and hashtags at roughly four times the usual rate, which it interpreted as bot activity. While the account itself was back online about an hour after the outage, restoring administrators’ access took longer, and Stone apologized for the confusion and inconvenience.

No Kings organizers didn’t buy it, and said Meta’s suspension of the account was “uncceptable.” The group said the suspension was tantamount to a massive corporation suppressing efforts to get the word out about early voting ahead of a major election. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut brought up the possibility of an official investigation, calling the account suspension a “total indictment” of Meta’s enormous influence on our political system, regardless of whether or not it was an honest mistake.

Louis Brandeis warned a century ago that democracy is in peril when a small number of private men own the channels through which citizens speak to one another. Back then he was talking about railroads and banks, but today a single company is capable of silencing a movement of millions just weeks before a nationwide election. The fact that this was likely a mere accident is the entire point, because no single entity should have so much power that a mistake could have that much of an impact.

Help Us Fight Back Against the Billionaires

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. Once again, please be sure to click the ❤️ and restack this post so we can reach the people who really need these stories.

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Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and the first real fall chill is finally in the air.

First, thank you. This week, more of you upgraded to paid as we push toward 10,000 paid subscribers before Election Day. Every single one of you is the reason Raw America exists. When I say we’re reader-funded, I don’t mean it as a slogan. I mean you.

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Hungary Just Showed Us What Comes After a Strongman

For sixteen years, Viktor Orbán was the model: the guy MAGA flew to Budapest to study. He captured the courts, bent the media to his will, and spent years targeting LGBTQ Hungarians in the name of “protecting children.”

In April, Hungarian voters threw him out. Now they’re dismantling what he built.

On Tuesday, parliament voted 139 to 51 to strip the anti-LGBTQ provisions out of Orbán’s 2021 “child protection” law, which banned any portrayal of gay or transgender people in content minors could see.

That’s just the latest. Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s government cut off state money to Orbán’s propaganda outlets and put independent leadership back at state TV. Orbán’s president was forced out, as was his chief prosecutor. Sixteen crony-run foundations were shuttered, returning billions to the public. And a new law bars anyone from serving as prime minister for more than eight years.

Critics say some moves came too fast. But six months ago, everyone said this strongman was unbeatable.

As we swing into the homestretch, I want you to remember Trump isn’t forever. Strongmen fall, and when they do, damage can be fixed. Courts can be restored. Laws can be repealed. A country can find its way back.

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Republicans Aren’t Showing Up to Vote

Here at home, the signs are good. Really good.

Early voting is underway in a number of states, and the early numbers from Iowa and North Carolina add to a growing pile of evidence that Democrats are fired up and Republicans aren’t.

In early voting data CNN highlighted, Republicans were turning out at just 32 percent of their 2024 first-day level. Democrats were at 73 percent. Unaffiliated voters were at 64 percent.

That’s not a gap; that’s a canyon.

In a separate survey, 76 percent of Democrats said voting this year was extremely important, compared to 63 percent of Republicans.

Trump spent this week rallying in Kentucky, Montana, and Alaska. Those aren’t swing states. That’s a party trying to hold its own turf.

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Democrats Are Swamping Them With Cash

Meanwhile, the money is pouring in.

James Talarico raised $64 million in the third quarter in Texas, which his campaign says is the most any U.S. Senate candidate has ever raised in a third quarter.

Jon Ossoff raised $33 million in Georgia. Sherrod Brown pulled in $28 million in Ohio. Roy Cooper bagged $19.5 million in North Carolina. Mary Peltola took in $17 million in Alaska. Even in Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton raised $10.6 million.

For comparison, Mike Rogers, the Republican running in Michigan, raised $9.6 million.

The numbers were so big that Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno’s reaction to Talarico’s haul was “holy crap.”

Holy crap, indeed.

Republicans still have their billionaires. The GOP’s Senate super PAC has outraised its Democratic counterpart, and Elon Musk just dropped $10 million into a PAC backing Ken Paxton.

Musk has likely spent hundreds of millions across various Senate races. But candidates get cheaper ad rates than super PACs, and Republican money comes from a handful of billionaires.

Our fundraising comes from millions of regular people. Regular people each have a vote. The numbers matter.

The Forecasters Keep Moving Our Way

On Friday, the Cook Political Report shifted 11 more House races toward Democrats, including Montana’s open 1st District. Trump won the district by 11 points just two years ago. It’s now rated a toss-up.

Nate Silver’s average has Democrats up nearly 9 points on the generic ballot, close to their high for the cycle. Decision Desk HQ gives Democrats a 77 percent chance of winning the House and a 56 percent chance of winning the Senate.

Even Fox News now projects Democrats could hold around 237 House seats on a good night. That’s a 22-seat gain.

The Washington Post reports Democrats now hold a clear edge on the economy for the first time in over a decade. Voters say government corruption is their top concern.

None of this is in the bag. Polls can be wrong, and the Senate is still a coin flip. But every single arrow is pointing in the same direction.

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What New Leadership Looks Like: A Million Frozen Rents

Hungary shows what we can undo. New York shows what we can build.

On October 1st, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze took effect for roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments. More than two million New Yorkers just got told their rent isn’t going up.

It’s a freeze on both one-year and two-year leases, which advocates say is the first two-year freeze in the Rent Guidelines Board’s history. The board voted 7 to 1 back in June. After four straight years of increases under Eric Adams, tenants finally got a break.

Mamdani made a promise on the campaign trail. Then he did what he promised.

Landlords are suing, of course, and the case is ongoing. But for now, the freeze stands.

Our sister publication, U.S. Democratic Socialists, interviewed Mamdani, and what struck me was how unglamorous his pitch was. Make it cheaper to live. That’s it.

The Road Back — Rebuilding Independent Media

I keep coming back to Hungary.

For years, people told Hungarians nothing would change. Orbán had the courts, the media, and the money. The system was rigged, so why bother?

But Hungarians bothered. And this week, a gay kid in Hungary got one step closer to seeing themselves in a book again.

If Raw America gives you hope — if you want news that shares your values, today’s the day to upgrade. To make it easy, I’m offering subscriptions now for 20% off.

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Republicans are staying home. Democrats are raising record money from regular people. The forecasters are moving our way. And a mayor in New York just proved that when you elect people who mean it, they can actually make life better.

Saner times aren’t a fantasy — Hungary is proof. But nobody hands them to you.

Vote. Get your friends to vote. And if you can, help us keep telling the truth through Election Day and beyond.

Thanks for being part of this family. See you next Sunday.

—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

Good afternoon. I’m John Byrne. Before we get going, tap that ❤️ and restack this edition. Every restack helps us beat the MAGA propaganda machine.

Michigan Republican Mike Rogers got caught on tape pitching off-duty cops as poll watchers in Detroit. Elon Musk is pouring roughly $366 million into the midterms, and Democrats say he’s buying lies. More than 3,000 No Kings events are underway across the country today, aiming for the biggest midterm early vote in American history. And Katie Zacharia lasted five days as White House press secretary, but her farewell photo may outlast her in federal court.

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Michigan’s MAGA Senate Candidate Wants Cops Watching Detroit’s Polls

A leaked tape just made MAGA candidate Mike Rogers look like an authoritarian in the Trump mold.

In audio posted Saturday by the Michigan Democratic Party, Rogers, who’s running for Michigan’s open Senate seat, lays out his Election Day plan for the state’s biggest city.

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Today, a high-ranking Trump administration source confided to Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem that White House staffers are terrified Stephen Miller could become the next chief of staff, calling him “evil incarnate.” Donald Trump is teasing criminal investigations into both Barack Obama and the Clinton family. In that same interview, Trump also insisted he’s allowed to pardon himself, while teasing pardons for some of his own top staffers. And new analysis finds the current session of Congress is one of the least productive in four decades.

Before we go further, independent media is in a critical spot and needs help from readers like you. Because Raw America has no wealthy owner or corporate parent, we can only keep bringing you these newsletters, original reporting from Washington and in-depth live interviews if readers are willing to financially support it.

We need to hit 10,000 subscribers by Election Day so we can keep this work going well into the future. We’re almost 90% of the way there. And right now you can get a full-year membership for 20% off. Can you commit to supporting independent journalism right now by becoming a paying subscriber?

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Exclusive: White House Staffers Fear Stephen Miller Could Become Next Chief of Staff

There’s a growing sense of dread within Donald Trump’s White House all centered around one man — and it’s not the president.

One high-ranking source within the Trump administration confided to Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem today that rank-and-file staffers across the executive branch are preparing for a worst-case scenario in the event that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles either resigns or is fired. According to Karem’s source, there’s real fear that the man who would be elevated to the position could lead to “a disaster that this country has never seen.”

Karem’s source said: “The only thing worse than Susie Wiles staying, is Susie Wiles leaving. That would leave Stephen Miller to be the new chief of staff. And no one likes him in this White House, including Donald Trump. And everyone thinks he is merely evil incarnate.”

Despite Wiles being Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, her job is reportedly in jeopardy. Trump is reportedly fuming after a wave of embarrassing news reports focused on Wiles’ daughter, Katie, who’s been doing paid lobbying work on behalf of Republika Srpska, which is a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Given that the president has been dogged by relentless allegations of being a tool of the Kremlin, it’s not hard to see why headlines like those would cause consternation in the Oval Office.

Anyone who is familiar with Miller’s career can understand the fear of him being handed an even greater level of power. He’s the primary architect of Trump’s hardline immigration agenda, including ICE crackdowns that led to the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and that have terrorized immigrant communities across the country from Los Angeles to Houston to Biddeford, Maine.

Back in 2019, during Trump’s first term, Miller was outed as a white nationalist. Leaked emails showed him promoting content from white nationalist websites to a Breitbart writer during Trump’s first campaign back in 2016. Even for the people who chose to work for this president, the idea of handing all of the White House’s day-to-day operations to a man like Stephen Miller is apparently bad enough to keep them up at night. Keep an eye on this one.

Trump Hints at Criminal Investigations Into Obama and Clinton Family

Trump recently sat down with far-right network Newsmax and told host Rob Finnerty he has “a lot of information” on former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

According to the president, he could have “done numbers” on all three and “still could.” When Finnerty asked him to clarify, Trump said he had the ability to “go after them criminally” and even “destroy their reputations.” He didn’t give any further explanation.

Asked whether he’d actually go through with a criminal investigation, Trump said he probably wouldn’t. However, he said so with the caveat that his attitude could change “if they impeach me, again,” before abruptly changing the subject.

It’s always news when sitting president openly contemplates about using the Department of Justice to hound his political enemies. But it’s even more noteworthy given that this president has a pattern of doing exactly that.

Trump’s DOJ unsuccessfully prosecuted New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, who won a civil suit against Trump after he was found to have artificially inflated the value of his real estate portfolio. Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted twice, with the first indictment getting thrown out after a judge ruled the U.S. attorney who signed the indictment hadn’t actually been properly appointed. A grand jury also refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video for social media urging active-duty service members to remember their duty to not follow illegal orders. The Trump administration has also launched investigations into California Senator Adam Schiff, former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

One main reason we have a Constitution is because the founders of this country revolted against a king who jailing his enemies. Trump is apparently determined to test the limits of that document.

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Trump Insists He’s ‘Allowed to Do a Self-Pardon’

In that same Newsmax interview, Trump also floated the idea of pardoning himself before he leaves office in 2029.

When asked if he was seriously considering issuing himself a preemptive pardon before the next president is inaugurated, Trump first stated he’d done “nothing wrong,” but then quickly added: “I’m allowed to do a self-pardon. I’m allowed to pardon,” saying it was the most powerful tool a president has.

Whether that’s true is far from settled. Just before Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that presidents can’t pardon themselves. Those opinions aren’t binding on the courts, however, and the question has never been tested.

What may matter even more is what Trump said next. He told Finnerty he doesn’t want people who work for him to “go through years of nonsense,” hiring lawyers to fend off what he called “lunatics” on the left. Weeks earlier, he told Time magazine he’s prepared to pardon members of his administration.

The signal to thousands of political appointees is hard to miss. Whatever they do on the job, the president is suggesting a pardon will be waiting. In an administration already plagued by corruption, that’s a dangerous green light.

Current Session of Congress Officially One of the Least Productive in Decades

While the White House talks pardons and prosecutions, Congress has barely been doing its job.

Pew’s analysis finds the 119th Congress has enacted just 121 laws since convening in January 2025. That’s the second-lowest total of any Congress in four decades at this point in its term, ahead of only the previous Congress, which had passed 106.

Between 1987 and 2009, Congresses averaged around 440 laws apiece before Election Day. Congresses since then have managed only about half that.

This Congress’ output includes Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, a stablecoin regulatory framework, $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting, the Epstein files disclosure law and a housing supply package. Another 23 laws simply overturned Biden-era regulations, and together with one voiding a D.C. local law, those reversals make up a fifth of everything passed.

Pew also notes that Congress keeps pushing more of its work into lame-duck sessions after elections. In the 118th Congress, 61% of its laws passed after Election Day, when members no longer had to face voters.

Don’t Let the Billionaires Win

It apparently isn’t enough for the billionaire class to simply buy our elections. They want to buy the media too, because they know that if they can control what we get to know, no one will ever be able to truly hold them accountable. This is why independent media is so important in this current moment.

But independent media only survives with the support of readers. We’re counting on readers like you, who understand and appreciate independent journalism, to step up and become paying subscribers. We’re almost 90% of our goal of hitting 10,000 subscribers by Election Day. Will you make today the day you officially becoming a paying member of Raw America?

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for watching, thanks for supporting independent news, and be sure to click the ❤️ and restack this newsletter if you haven’t already so we can break through and reach the people who really need to hear these stories.

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With virtually no mention or reporting in the corporate press, Republican-run states are again running the voter purge of millions that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2024.

Yesterday morning, Reuters published a special report on the ways the Trump administration could “interfere” with the midterms, noting that a lawyer in Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office bragged that his state had “taken a leading role in ensuring its voter registration list is purged…"

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Today, the White House is reportedly in a state of panic as Donald Trump is apparently on the fence about whether to fire his longtime chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Several people inside Trump’s inner circle of MAGA activists are now contemplating a martial law declaration and even the seizure of voting machines if Republicans lose the November midterm election. Big Tech oligarchs are reportedly spending more than $1 million every day in an effort to stop California’s proposed billionaire tax. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now asking owners of private parking lots to stop ICE from using their properties as staging grounds.

Before the news: we’re counting on readers like you, who believe in independent journalism, to keep this work going. Every day the billionaires who own most of the media lay off talented journalists and bury stories that tell the truth they find inconvenient. Raw America has no billionaire owner. We have you. But whether we stay in the fight is completely up to you.

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White House in a ‘State of Panic’ as Power Struggle Unfolds

The West Wing is quickly becoming embroiled in chaos. According to today’s edition of the Politico Playbook, Trump had what was described as a “freakout” after his intensely devoted aide Natalie Harp printed out a previous Playbook from earlier this week about White House chief of staff Susie Wiles potentially being replaced after the midterms. That Playbook described how the president was put off by bad press about Wiles’ lobbyist daughter, Katie, doing paid work for an ally of Vladimir Putin.

Both Wiles and her team apparently spent most of the day calling anyone who would listen to assure them she was staying put, but that strategy didn’t pan out. One unnamed White House source told the outlet that Trump’s White House is “in a state of panic,” with Wiles apparently scrambling to enlist people to vouch for her. Meanwhile, Trump has reportedly spoken with allies about potentially replacing her with candidates like deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, New York Yankees president Randy Levine, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump loyalist Bill Pulte and even former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The White House is publicly denying that anything is amiss. Spokesperson Danielle Alvarez slammed Politico’s reporting as “unbelievably stupid and false” and claimed there’s no panic because no one in the administration reads the outlet. Trump himself told Politico that Wiles has his “COMPLETE confidence.” However, that could change if Republicans suffer significant losses in the midterm election. One Trump ally anonymously confided to the outlet that the current power struggle is only going to intensify in the coming weeks.

Back in 1883, we professionalized the federal government with the Pendleton Act after a failed political candidate assassinated President James Garfield. Congress knew that a government dependent on one man’s moods and loyalties is more of a royal court than a republic. When the president’s chief of staff spends the bulk of her day begging supporters for endorsements instead of running the country, all of us who depend on a functional government end up paying the price.

Trump’s MAGA Advisors Discuss Martial Law Declaration if GOP Loses Midterms

This next one is particularly alarming: some of the people with direct access to the president are reportedly now urging him to declare martial law and even seize voting equipment should Republicans lose their majorities in the midterms. They believe a Democratic wave would be evidence that the election was “rigged,” which in their view would justify extreme measures — including ones that are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.

Donald Trump’s childhood friend and attorney Peter Ticktin recently joined a livestreamed video call with noted election denier Gregory Stenstrom and recently pardoned MAGA activist Tina Peters. The group suggested various ideas including halting the election, invoking the National Emergencies Act and mandating that all ballots nationwide be hand-counted — a process that’s both incredibly error-prone and that could take weeks. These aren’t fringe extremists, either: Peters and Ticktin met with Trump earlier this month. Prominent 2020 election deniers like Heather Honey now hold senior roles overseeing election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.

Experts well versed in U.S. election law make it clear the Constitution doesn’t allow the president to have this kind of power. Derek Tisler of the Brennan Center for Justice explained to Axios that even under emergency powers and martial law, the president doesn’t have the authority to override state election laws, postpone elections or have federal agents seize ballots and voting machines. Tisler noted the president is still bound by laws passed by Congress, and clear language in the Constitution that grants states, not the federal government, oversight over elections.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis would only give a boilerplate response stating that Trump believes every legal vote should be counted and that Americans deserve safe and secure elections conducted in a transparent manner. The administration has yet to act on any of these extreme ideas after nearly two years in office. But the fact that the president’s closest allies are seriously pitching these ideas should be seen as a flashing red light as the November election approaches.

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1866 Ex parte Milligan decision that no president can impose martial law anywhere that civilian courts are operating. That case originated from Abraham Lincoln’s own wartime military commissions during an armed uprising. If the Court refused to grant Lincoln those powers during the Civil War, there’s no way under the Constitution that Donald Trump gets them simply because he doesn’t like the result of an election.

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Tech Oligarchs Spending $1 Million Every Day to Stop California’s Billionaire Tax

California’s billionaires are showing just how far they’ll go to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The Guardian is reporting that Silicon Valley billionaires have amassed a war chest in excess of $340 million to defeat Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time tax of five percent on all assets over $1 billion. The revenue would go toward funding healthcare, education and food assistance programs that Republicans cut last year in order to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthiest. In just the first 19 days of September, billionaires spent at least $21.2 million opposing Prop 40, amounting to more than $1 million a day.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin — the world’s fourth-richest man with a net worth exceeding $259 billion — has spent $102 million of his own money on opposing Prop 40. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has put in more than $42 million, while right-wing billionaires Peter Thiel, Patrick Collison and Tony Xu are also spending significant sums. Meanwhile, the Yes on 40 campaign, which is mostly funded by the healthcare workers union SEIU-UHW, has raised a little under $33 million to rally support for the initiative.

The union says the money that would be raised from the new tax is essential to preserve healthcare for 3.4 million low-income California residents who would otherwise lose Medicaid coverage thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The opposition’s ads deceptively call Prop 40 “an everyone tax” and focus on doctors, teachers and firefighters without once mentioning billionaires. Opponents of Prop 40 are also backing two countermeasures — Propositions 41 and 42 — which will appear on the November ballot. If either measure more “yes” votes than Prop 40, the billionaire tax will be dead even if it passes, and any future billionaire tax would be put on ice.

The massive wave of spending seems to be influencing voters. A University of California poll conducted in late September found that Prop 40 was only leading by a 45-42 margin, which is a decrease from its previous 7-point lead from August. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont held a rally in San Francisco last week and called Prop 40 the most important ballot initiative in the country. California Labor Federation president Lorena Gonzalez urged Californians to support the initiative, saying the state can’t let billionaires “buy our elections and choose who gets to live or die.”

In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke at Madison Square Garden, boasting that organized money was unanimous in their hatred of him, and that he welcomed their hatred. But while Roosevelt’s enemies had to win an election to stop him, Sergey Brin and his fellow oligarchs are hoping to just write a big enough check and hire actors to play doctors and firefighters on television.

Mamdani Urges Parking Lot Owners to Ban ICE from Their Property

Finally, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is joining more than 100 elected officials from across the Empire State to urge more than a thousand owners of private parking garages and parking lots to stop letting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents use their properties as staging grounds. In a joint letter issued today, they’re also challenging lot and garage owners to directly tell ICE that it agents don’t have authorization to use their facilities.

The letter comes a week after ICE agents in New York City’s Marble Hill neighborhood surrounded 28-year-old Oscar Belgal’s car and fired on him, striking him in the neck while his five year-old son was inside the vehicle. Agents were reportedly using a private lot just a few blocks away as a staging ground prior to the shooting.

New York City law already prevents ICE from using city-owned property without first obtaining a judicial warrant. However, those protections don’t include private property. ICE has also used two bank-owned parking lots in Queens and a garage on Morton Street in Manhattan as staging grounds. Those lots removed ICE vehicles after community members spoke out. Notably, no officials from the Republican-dominated borough of Staten Island co-signed the joint letter.

The founders wrote the Third Amendment — which prohibits the government from quartering armed forces on private property without owner consent — because the redcoats used colonists’ homes as staging grounds. They correctly understood that when an armed federal force relies on private property to oppress their neighbors, the easiest solution is to allow a property owner to say no.

Don’t Let the Billionaires Win

It’s not hard to see why billionaires are using their bottomless wealth to buy elections and gobble up media outlets: they know we outnumber them and that we have the power to defeat them if we unite. This is why independent media is so critical in a democracy, and why we’re counting on you to step up and make sure we have the ability to stand up to organized money.

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Today at the Rose Garden, Donald Trump told the assembled crowd that he has “some very severe problems” but then refused to elaborate and tried to change the subject. Former Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz is facing a new federal lawsuit from two women who accuse him of sex trafficking when they had just graduated high school. The Pentagon has finished its report investigating a strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed 120 children, but is keeping it hidden until after the November midterms. And the FBI is now looking into more than 100 suspicious letters sent to state election officials across the country, with some of them containing a white powdery substance.

One more thing before the news: the right-wing billionaires buying up the media aren’t slowing down, and we can’t either. We’re not just up against MAGA oligarchs like David Ellison and Jeff Bezos — we’re also battling tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, whose algorithms are actively blocking our stories from reaching our followers. Your inbox is the one thing they can’t touch, and becoming a subscriber means you’ll never miss any of these important stories.

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Trump Admits He Has ‘Very Severe Problems Before Abruptly Changing Subject

Donald Trump made a puzzling remark at a Thursday Rose Garden event meant to honor first responders. While talking about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, Trump suddenly made the conversation about himself and left us with a lot more questions about what’s really going on behind the scenes.

The president told the crowd that he’s lucky because he doesn’t smoke or drink, and has no desire to do so. He went on to say that he has friends with drinking problems who “have a real hard time.” And he added that if he did have a drinking problem, he he probably “wouldn’t be here right now.”

Then, he said: “I have other problems I have some very severe problems, but those are not one of them.”

At that point, Trump seemed to realize that he’d just potentially handed the press an entirely new news cycle. He then turned toward Attorney General Todd Blanche and said, “I probably set myself up for that one, Todd,” and quipped that Blanche may have to defend him against the questions. The president quickly tried to walk the comment, telling event attendees, “I actually don’t know. I was just having fun to the media.”

The 80 year-old president has been sparking health questions with consistent bruising on his hands, taking repeated cognitive tests and repeatedly falling asleep in public. We all deserve to know what “severe problems” Trump has that he’s not telling us about.

Two Women Accuse Matt Gaetz of Sex Trafficking in New Lawsuit

Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, who resigned from Congress in November 2024, is now the defendant in a new civil lawsuit accusing him of sex trafficking two young women. The 38-page complaint was officially filed in federal court Thursday in the Middle District of Florida.

The plaintiffs, who are only identified in the suit as “Jane Doe 1” and “Jane Doe 2,” allege that Gaetz and two others coordinated recruitment, payments, drugs and travel to obtain sex from them between 2017 and January 2019. Both women wrote in the complaint that they were recent high school graduates at the time they were trafficked, and the defendants used the power of their office, wealth and connections to prey on their vulnerability.

One of the other men named in the lawsuit is Joel Greenberg, who is both the former tax collector for Seminole County and a longtime associate of Gaetz. Greenberg pleaded guilty in 2021 to six federal charges including sex trafficking of a child, and is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence. The lawsuit claims Greenberg recruited the two women through the website SeekingArrangement.com and introduced them both to Gaetz.

Jane Doe 1 says she had sex with Gaetz at a party in July of 2017, where she says she saw him with a 17-year-old girl who was paid $400 in cash. According to the complaint, Gaetz and Greenberg paid Jane Doe 1 on at least 19 separate occasions. Jane Doe 2 alleges that she had sex with both Gaetz and Greenberg at a party where MDMA pills were distributed. The suit also gives details about paid trips to various locations including Las Vegas, the Florida Keys and the Bahamas.

In a statement to the Guardian, Gaetz denied the allegations, while maintaining much of the alleged conduct is false and that he looks forward to deposing the plaintiffs. He also shared a 2018 social media photo of three women on a beach, suggesting the plaintiffs gave a different portrayal of their Bahamas trip than what they alleged in the complaint.

Let’s all keep in mind that in December of 2024, a bipartisan House ethics investigation found that Gaetz paid women for sex and drugs at least 20 different times, and that he had sex with a 17-year-old in 2017, though the former congressman continues to deny any wrongdoing. And remember that this is the same man Trump almost made his second-term attorney general.

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Pentagon Keeping Report on Girls’ School Bombing Secret Until After Midterms

The Pentagon has finished its internal investigation into the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, which killed more than 150 people, including 120 young girls. But we apparently won’t get to see it until after the midterm elections.

Bloomberg reports that the investigation has been completed for months. The report supposedly blames flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance on artificial intelligence for the Tomahawk missile strike that blew up the school on the first day of the Iran war. Trump shrugged off the bombing in June, saying “mistakes are made. War is nasty.”

National Iranian American Council policy director Ryan Costello stated that the government’s refusal to come clean about the Minab strike isn’t just a shameful way to hide from accountability after committing a horrific war crime, but that keeping the report secret means that the errors that led to the strike could happen again. He referenced separate strikes on a family’s home on Iran’s Qeshm Island and on a wedding party in Kuhestak in the Hormozgan province that killed two children.

Policy analyst Brian Finucane was more blunt, suggesting that the Pentagon likely want to give voters a fresh reminder that the Trump administration killed 120 schoolgirls on the eve of the midterms.

Meanwhile, the administration seems to be undeterred in its escalation of the Iran war. According to CNN, the U.S. is contemplating dropping the “mother of all bombs” — the largest non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal — on Iranian energy infrastructure. Sina Toossi of the Center for International Policy warned that a severe attack on the Iranian energy sector could lead to severe consequences for both global markets and the U.S. economy. The war has dragged on since February with essentially no clear end in sight.

Multiple State Election Officials Receive Suspicious Envelopes with ‘Powdery’ Substance

The FBI announced Thursday that it’s conducting an investigation into a wave of suspicious envelopes mailed to state election officials across the country. Apparently more than 100 letters went out, with recipients including at least one U.S. senator and a prominent pollster.

Election officials in both Louisiana and Oklahoma told authorities they received letters containing an unknown “white powdery substance.” Federal authorities have intercepted similar letters that were addressed to secretaries of state in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Ohio.

Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said election officials should never have to live in fear for simply doing their jobs. He characterized the letters as cowardly threats that won’t deter his office and staff. The FBI said it’s working alongside both the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and local law enforcement agencies to respond appropriately to each incident.

This has happened before. In the 2024 election, multiple suspicious packages were sent to various election officials in at least six different states. The people who count our votes are increasingly being targeted by bad actors, and that should cause significant alarm for anyone who cares about democracy and fair elections.

Help Us Fight Back Against Billionaire Censorship

We’re getting under the skin of the MAGA billionaires who run the media and distribution platforms. On Facebook, where many of you first found us, Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithm is preventing our stories from reaching our followers. Elon Musk is doing the same on X. This is likely a response to our coverage of both Zuckerberg and Musk cozying up to Trump.

We’re clearly doing something right. But this also means we need your help to make sure the billionaires trying to keep us quiet don’t win. The best way to do that is by subscribing. We’re currently offering 20% off all memberships until we hit 10,000 subscribers. We’re almost 90% of the way there. Can you commit to supporting independent media as a paying member right now?

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House Republicans are quietly bracing for a massive wipeout in the midterms as Democrats continue to make gains in congressional districts Donald Trump won by double digits just two years ago. A new NPR focus group of Georgia voters who cast their ballot for Trump in 2024 now regret it and are now signaling they’ll be voting for Democrats in November. Leaked text messages show Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, is getting a wave of criticism from her co-workers in the White House after her disastrous first briefing, and new scrutiny over her legal career given that she never actually passed the bar exam. And the president recently told an audience at a campaign rally that sky-high gas prices are actually fine, because it means the country is “making a fortune” off of working families paying more at the pump.

Before we go further, independent media is under attack and we’re counting on readers like you to help us fight. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, where many of you found us, is deliberately burying our stories in its algorithm after we called him out for cozying up to Trump. Top GOP donor Elon Musk is also blocking our stories from reaching our followers on his platform. The MAGA billionaires who control most of the media don’t want people reading these stories.

But your inbox is the one thing they can’t touch. By subscribing to receive these stories directly, your voice becomes one more they can’t silence. We’re making it even easier to become a paying subscriber by offering 20% off an annual membership until we hit 10,000 subscribers. We’re nearly 90% of the way there. Will you commit to supporting independent media today?

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In case you missed it, click here to read yesterday’s exclusive report from Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem, about White House staffers hiring lawyers in preparation for filing whistleblower complaints against Trump. And click here to watch our recent interview with Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried, who revealed how Democrats are aiming to flip Trump’s home state.

Panicked House Republicans Prepare for Blowout Loss in Midterms

House Republicans are going through a range of emotions right now including panic, anger and resignation. Some Republicans are even admitting as much on the record according to Punchbowl News.

Republican Congressman Dave Joyce of Ohio, who has served for 13 years, said the current political mood in America is “certainly toxic for Republicans.” He acknowledged that even though voters “were promised things in ‘24,” virtually “none of those things are really coming to fruition.” and that his party should simply be honest with their constituents instead of trying to put a positive spin on things.

Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania is running for another term in one of the most competitive districts in the country. He’s also wondering why Republican leaders ever pretended 2026 would be good for them. He noted the historical trend of the incumbent party in the White House almost always losing midterm elections, with second-term presidents typically seeing even more brutal midterm results. Fitzpatrick said the lone outliers are major historical events like the 9/11 attacks, and “those factors are not present.”

We’re seeing evidence of Republican panic in how GOP-aligned super PACs are spending their money. Even Republicans in deep-red territory are facing brutal polls that show them either losing to Democrats or within the margin of error.

In the meantime, Democrats are continuing to find new opportunities to potentially flip Republican seats in districts previously seen as GOP strongholds. This includes Indiana’s 5th Congressional District, which Trump won by 17 points two years ago. New York’s 21st Congressional District may also flip, even though Trump won it by more than 20 points. Additionally, both Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District and Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District are up for grabs. National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson’s North Carolina district along with Congressman Mike Flood’s district in Nebraska have also become competitive.

Down in Florida’s 16th Congressional District, Sydney Gruters — who is the wife of current Republican National Committee chairman Joe Gruters, is in a tight race with former Sarasota Mayor Kelly Kirschner, who is currently outspending her on TV ads. Republicans have even had to spend significant sums in an attempt to keep outgoing Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s deep-red South Carolina district.

This is exactly what the framers envisioned when they authored Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution and gave House members two-year terms. Madison explained in Federalist 52 that the House of Representatives needed “an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people,” That immediate dependence is what no president can veto, fire or pardon his way around. Republicans aren’t fretting because of bad polls, but because the Constitution is working as intended.

Swing State Voters Regret Their Vote for Trump and Move Toward Democrats

Some of the voters in crucial swing states who reelected Trump in 2024 are openly regretting their decision, and many of them are making up for it in the midterms.

NPR sat in on two online focus groups on Tuesday night with 12 Georgia voters who swung from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024. Eleven of those voters said they’re underwhelmed by Trump’s performance as president. 10 of them said they regret their vote.

One 43-year-old participant named Charles P. said he’s unable to find “any positive to this administration at all,” blaming Trump for higher inflation, a new war in the Middle East and tariffs that haven’t done anything except make everything more expensive. Richard A., a 56-year-old Republican voter who’s been out of work for 10 months, lamented that food has simply become too expensive, ICE is “tearing families apart” and the war in Iran is raging on with no end in sight

Rich Thau, who is the president of the messaging firm Engagious, has been moderating the monthly focus groups this year. He observed that in prior months, voters said the primarily evaluated candidates on a case-by-case basis. But this month, seven of the 12 said Trump is pushing them into the arms of Democrats, which Thau said was a brand-new trend he hadn’t seen before.

Ten of the 12 Trump voters in the Georgia focus group they’ll be voting to reelect Senator Jon Ossoff, with some participants saying they appreciate that he won’t be a rubber stamp for the administration. Thau said several participants in this month’s focus group viewed a Democratic Congress as the best way to restore order and rein in Trump. One Republican focus group member named Jennifer W. said that if the GOP stays in power, she fears “Trump would have free rein.”

You don’t have to go back too far to see a similar pattern. In 1972, Richard Nixon won 49 states. Two years later, the very same voters who gave him that landslide victory handed Democrats 49 new House seats. This is simply because people figured out that an executive branch incapable of being checked is dangerous. Buyer’s remorse is a fantastic self-correcting feature in a democracy, and it appears to be right on schedule.

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Leaked Texts Show Trump White House Staffers Bashing New Press Secretary

Newly minted White House press secretary Katie Zacharia isn’t even a week into her new job, but her colleagues aren’t wasting any time tearing her apart.

The former Fox News personality delivered her first White House briefing Tuesday. She was seen fumbling her way through her prepared remarks, accidentally referred to the president as her husband and only took questions from three far-right outlets before walking offstage after just 14 minutes. The president and his team said they were impressed with her debut, but according to leaked text messages obtained by the Daily Mail, many of her colleagues didn’t share that view.

One top White House official told the Mail that Zacharia “could barely read.” Another source wondered if there was someone in the White House wanted her to fail. A third staffer said Zacharia’s hiring shows the Trump administration “is collapsing” under pressure, and that as the Iran war continues to escalate, the administration is “completely unequipped.”

Zacharia’s career as a lawyer has also come under scrutiny, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that the new White House press secretary failed the bar exam back in 2011 after finishing law school and never actually obtained a license to practice law. But during an August appearance on Fox News, she described herself “as a lawyer” while discussing the criminal case of MAGA commentator Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer. The Journal observed that some states will bring criminal charges against someone for falsely claiming to be a lawyer.

When reporters asked Zacharia which state she was licensed to practice law in, she told them it was when she “moved to China.” She later changed that answer in comments to the New York Times, saying she “assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school.’”

Franklin Roosevelt hosted almost 1,000 press conferences over his 12-year tenure, speaking with reporters around his desk and taking questions. He understood that a president who refuses to talk to the press no longer serves the people. Trump’s approach to that tradition is hiring a talking head who lied about her legal career and ended her first briefing after less than 15 minutes. That’s a direct statement about how little this president thinks he owes us.

Trump Tries to Spin High Gas Prices as a Positive Development

Only a few hours after new Department of Labor data showed that inflation hit its highest point in several months, Trump went to a rally in a swing state and tried to convince Americans that skyrocketing gas prices were actually a good thing.

Trump told an Arizona crowd on Wednesday that oil-producing places like Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota were “making a fortune” due to persistently high oil prices. Those states are all host to fossil fuel mega-corporations that have posted record-high profits since Trump launched his illegal war against Iran.

A gallon of regular gas costs an average of $4.33 a gallon right now, while a gallon of diesel will run the average driver $6.32. Trump maintains that these prices will go back down once his war is over, but he’s lost significant amounts of credibility by repeatedly giving everyone false timelines that haven’t held up. He also hasn’t shown a lot of interest in striking a long-term diplomatic agreement with the Iranian government.

Of course, Trump’s stock portfolio has arguably never been in better shape. The president is a major investor in the oil and gas sector, and one analysis found his fossil fuel investments have padded his net worth by roughly $15.5 million since January.

Meanwhile, working-class families are being squeezed beyond recognition. Brown University’s Watson School estimates that Americans have paid an extra $135 billion in higher fuel costs since the Iran war began in February. That amounts to roughly $1,030 per household. Senior economist Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute wrote this week that workers “are losing the race between wages and prices,” with real wages dropping for six straight months in comparison to last year. And a new Harris poll found three in four voters are worried about a new recession. Even 96 percent of Republicans told pollsters the country is in the midst of an affordability crisis.

When we fought World War I back in 1917, Congress passed a tax on windfall profits that reclaimed up to 60 percent of the money companies made from the war, because people on both sides of the aisle agreed that nobody should get rich from Americans dying. Today the president who needlessly went to war is personally up as much as $15.5 million thanks to his oil stocks, while calling the $4.33 price for a gallon of gas “a fortune” for himself and his rich friends. The fact that the law allows this shows just how far we’ve gone from the days when war profiteering was a crime.

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The legacy media outlets owned by right-wing billionaires like David Ellison and Jeff Bezos will only tell you the news they want you to know. They won’t tell you about Republicans panicking over a midterm blowout or a president trying to sell you a bill of goods because that doesn’t support their preferred narrative. But because Raw America has no billionaire owner calling the shots, we can give you the straight, unfiltered truth.

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Today, former Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle is reportedly “spiraling” after Donald Trump fired her, and she’s now apparently refusing to leave her official residence in Athens. The family of a British man killed by a tiger is begging the president to please stop circulating the video of his death on social media. Ohio Republican Vivek Ramaswamy accidentally featured a registered sex offender in his campaign materials on two separate occasions. And new inflation numbers show that, thanks to Trump’s war, prices are skyrocketing while our incomes are continuing to shrink.

One more thing before the news: tech oligarchs Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are censoring our stories on their platforms and we need your help. Someone at Facebook, where thousands of you discovered us, is intentionally using the algorithm to prevent our stories from reaching our followers. But your voice becomes one more they can’t silence when you subscribe to receive these stories directly in your inbox, which they can’t touch.

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If you missed it, click here read today’s original report from Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem about how Trump staffers are quietly lawyering up in preparation to blow the whistle on his corruption. And click here to watch our interview today with Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried.

Kimberly Guilfoyle Reportedly Won’t Leave Ambassador’s Residence Despite Being Fired

Former Fox News host — and onetime fiancee of Donald Trump Jr. — Kimberly Guilfoyle was fired as ambassador to Greece in a uniquely humiliating fashion. Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, announced Guilfoyle’s firing in her very first briefing. According to the Daily Beast’s PunchUp Substack, Guilfoyle didn’t take the news well.

According to one MAGA source Guilfoyle spent most of last night in a panicked state, calling multiple wealthy GOP donors and trying to enlist their support for her continuing to stay in her role. Another unnamed official said Guilfoyle overstayed her welcome and that the White House was effectively forced to fire her on live TV.

Guilfoyle’s problems began with allegations about her personal finances. The former Fox News host allegedly asked Republican donor Eric Deters to pay off her $100,000 American Express bill in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail, while offering potential access to influential people in Trump’s inner circle. The State Department’s inspector general has apparently been looking into various claims about Guilfoyle’s excessive luxury travel accommodations, improper gifts and her treatment of embassy staff.

Several insiders in both the Greek government and the U.S. State Department confided to the Daily Mail that last year, Guilfoyle approached several wealthy Greek businessmen in an attempt to get them to pony up $250,000 so she could pay off her luxury Mercedes-Benz SUV. The Mail’s sources say, however, she never got the money she was asking for.

Guilfoyle continues to deny all of the allegations through her lawyer, Jesse Binnall. She went on to say that some of the more damning messages she was alleged to have written were actually AI-generated, though White House officials were reportedly skeptical of that claim. Guilfoyle wrote on X that the allegations were false, and that she continues to have unwavering loyalty to Trump.

These days, she’s apparently “holed up” at the official ambassador’s residence in Athens. The Mail reported she’s been telling her own contacts that she can no longer trust anyone around her, and that unnamed officials within the Greek government refused to meet with her. One American official confided that no one in the Trump administration actually wants her to come back.

Family of Man Killed by Tiger Begs Trump to Stop Exploiting His Death

The UK-based family of 23 year-old William Chapman is grieving his horrific loss, and say that the president of the United States is needlessly exploiting his death at the hands of a tiger.

Chapman was killed Saturday after walking into a tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park near Doncaster. His family said he was a bright, warm and engaging young man who has unfortunately struggled with mental illness for years, for which he was prescribed strong medication. Authorities are opening up an inquest on Thursday, and the local council has launched a health and safety investigation into Chapman’s death.

On Tuesday, Trump shared a clip of the vicious attack with his 13 million followers on his Truth Social platform. The video shows the tiger biting and clawing Chapman, with Trump adding the caption “Don’t ever mess with nature!” He then added his own post showing an AI-generated version of himself playing with the tiger, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” complete with him copying Chapman’s finger-pointing gesture Chapman from the initial footage of his death.

Chapman’s family released a public statement saying that the circulation of the video is deeply offensive to them, adding that it’s caused significant emotional distress at a fragile time for those close to Chapman. Will Travers of the Born Free Foundation said Trump’s AI video was incredibly insensitive to the family and said it has the potential to inspire people to get into their own deadly encounters with captive animals.

Presidents are usually known for offering condolences to grieving families during vulnerable moments. But a president turning a mentally ill young man’s death into social media clickbait should tell us everything we need to know about the character of the man currently inhabiting the Oval Office.

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GOP Candidate Accidentally Features Registered Sex Offender in Campaign Ad

Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy apparently has a serious problem with vetting the people who appear in his campaign materials.

The Bulwark reported today that Ramaswamy posted and subsequently deleted a video in September that showed him shaking hands with a man confirmed to be a registered sex offender. And a month later, that same man was seen again in an ad Ramswamy ran on TV.

The man is Vernon Edwards of Amherst, Ohio. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to gross sexual imposition with a child aged 13 or under. He was criminally charged in a case involving a 13-year-old girl, and was hit with similar allegations involving his nieces.

Edwards isn’t heard speaking in the commercial, but he’s visible in background footage while his wife, Patty, praises Ramaswamy for helping to lower her property taxes. It’s bad enoug to make a mistake like that once, but doing it a second time after the campaign already deleted the first video, suggests the Ramaswamy campaign is flying blind.

New Inflation Numbers Confirm Trump Is Wrecking the Economy

Also today, the Labor Department released its latest Consumer Price Index report, which showed prices rose by an average of 0.6 percent just last month alone. For context, that’s the single biggest monthly jump over the last several months. And when looking at year-over-year numbers, prices are now 3.7 percent higher than they were last September.

One primary driver for the high inflation is fuel. Gas prices went up by 9.1 percent in September, which accounted for nearly half the overall increase. Meanwhile fuel oil, which millions of Americans use to heat their homes in some of the coldest parts of the country, skyrocketed by a whopping 15.3 percent, making the biggest jump since March. That was shortly after Trump went to war with Iran, and that war is still ongoing as of today.

Trump has insisted that oil is still cheaper today than it was under former President Joe Biden. While the price for a barrel of Brent crude did briefly jump to just shy of $140 in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, prices at the pump stabilized shortly after. Regular unleaded gasoline leveled out around $3.20 a gallon by the end of that year and stayed there until Trump took office in Januar of 2025. Today’s national average is $4.33.

This is all happening while paychecks are heading in the opposite direction. The New York Times is reporting that hourly wages fell by 0.5 percent in August and went down by over 0.7 percent over the last year. That means real wages are stuck at approximately the same level as when Trump took office. The White House largely dismissed the report, writing on social media that Americans should simply trust the process.

The Federal Reserve is expected to discuss the potential of raising interest rates yet again at the end of October, just prior to the midterms, as a means of slowing down runaway inflation. While inflation rates may slow down as a result, it would also make it more costly for working families to borrow, given that they’re already being squeezed by both Trump’s tariffs and his ongoing war in the Middle East.

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Watch today’s interview with Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried:

• Florida Democrats’ chances in this year’s U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races

• How both progressive Senate candidate Angie Nixon and moderate gubernatorial candidate David Jolly are both making inroads with voters

• Why Trump has become damaged goods even in his adopted home state, and how Democrats have flipped 48 seats in the last 18 months

• The corruption scandal dogging Republican Senator Ashley Moody

• How Florida Democrats are competing with Republicans massive fundraising advantage — with help from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders

• Why Florida Republicans’ “dummymander” may backfire

• How Florida voters can make sure their votes are counted

• Why Democrats across the country can’t afford to concede Florida

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Democrats Could Pull Off Huge Wins in Marquee Races

Gibson opened the conversation by asking Fried whether the latest polls that show Angie Nixon (who Raw America interviewed in August) and David Jolly within the margin of error in their respective races matched what she’s seeing on the ground. Fried said that after the last few elections, she’s less interested in what individual polls are saying versus trends, and that she also has an exclusive insight into candidates’ internal polling for races at all levels.

“While the methodology is all different, while the locations are different, types of people polling, everything seems to be pointed to the same direction,” Fried said. “From congressional seats to legislative seats to statewide races, everything is within the margins of error on both sides of these races.”

Fried also noted that Democrats’ optimism is partially due to voters’ anger with Republicans both in Washington and in Tallahassee.

“People are so pissed about not only what has happened in Washington, D.C., but we’ve had one party controlling the state for 30 years,” she said. “What has that power given to the people of our state? How has that made their lives better? And it just hasn’t. And so the people of our state are ready to take back their power.”

Voters Are Lining Up to Support ‘Fighters’

Gibson observed that Democrats’ candidates at the top of the Florida ballot come from very different places on the ideological spectrum. While Nixon is an outspoken progressive running on issues like Medicare for All, Jolly — a former Republican congressman from the Tampa area who left the party during Trump’s first term — is running a more moderate campaign focused on the cost of living. Regardless of their differences, both candidates have been gaining significant ground over the past several months.

Fried said both candidates are seeing success because they’re running on economic populism and capitalizing on bipartisan outrage over Donald Trump’s war in Iran and his unpopular tariffs.

“[Republicans are] putting billionaires first. They’re putting Elon Musk first. They’re putting the tech bros first. They’re putting Trump first. They’re putting the MAGA brand first. Not the people,” Fried said. “While Angie and David are certainly on a very wide spectrum of solutions, they’re honing in on the same message: that people can’t afford to live here.”

The Florida Democratic Party chair also highlighted a report released this week showing that utility companies have been wining and dining the officials tasked with regulating them, and said voters are now no longer voting based purely on partisan affiliation.

“People are not wanting labels,” Fried said. “They want solutions. They want fighters who are going to show up.”

How Trump Is Dragging Down Republicans in His Home State

Gibson called attention to signs that Trump has become damaged goods even in his adopted home state, with Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds removing mentions of the president from his campaign website and Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar releasing an ad about how Trump’s ICE crackdowns are alienating Latino voters in the Sunshine State. And he pointed out that the last time Fried appeared on Raw America, Democrats had just successfully flipped the Florida House district that includes Mar-a-Lago.

Fried said that seat is just one of four dozen that Florida Democrats have taken from Republicans since the spring of 2025. This includes mayoral races in both the City of Miami, Boca Raton and Key West; a state Senate seat in the Tampa area, and even a seat in ruby-red Escambia County, which Fried said Democrats hadn’t won in decades. She also dismissed Republicans downplaying those victories as flukes.

“Republicans want to say, ‘Oh, special elections, special elections,’ but the reality is these weren’t special elections,” Fried said. “These are municipal calendar elections that happen every two to four years, and we weren’t winning those previously.”

Fried gave a shout-out to Pendulum, which is the state Democratic Party’s year-round statewide organizing program. According to Fried, Pendulum has made roughly 3.9 million voter contacts via phone, text, and canvassing over the last 18 months. She also observed that Trump’s draconian immigration agenda has taken a serious toll on Florida’s agricultural hubs.

“The fields are barren. People are not showing up to work because of all the ICE raids,” she said.

Fried also heaped criticism on the “Alligator Alcatraz” ICE detention facility as little more than a $1.6 billion giveaway of public money to Republican donors through no-bid contracts. She said those same donors are now funneling money back to GOP candidates like Byron Donalds and Ashley Moody.

“The energy here is we’re pissed, we are ready for change, and finally, the Democratic Party is showing up and giving us a reason to come out and vote for them,” Fried said.

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Florida’s Incumbent GOP Senator Embroiled in Corruption Scandal

Gibson then pivoted to former Florida Attorney General-turned-Senator Ashley Moody, who was appointed to her seat after Marco Rubio joined the Trump administration and is now running for a full six-year term. He asked whether the Hope Florida scandal — in which roughly $10 million in Medicaid settlement money was funneled to various Republican groups through Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis’ nonprofit — was haunting Moody on the campaign trail.

Fried first laid out the timeline of the scandal. As she explained, Medicaid provider Centene was caught over-billing states, prompting Florida to negotiate a $67 million settlement. Somewhere along the way, $10 million of that money went to Hope Florida before finding its way to two other nonprofits, before eventually trickling down to a political action committee controlled by James Uthmeier — the current attorney general of Florida who previously served as Gov. Ron DeSantis’s chief of staff.

From there, Fried explained that the money went to the Republican Party of Florida, which used it to defeat the 2024 ballot initiative to legalize recreational cannabis across the Sunshine State. That amendment received 54 percent of the vote, which, while still a clear majority, fell short of the 60% threshold Florida requires for new constitutional amendments.

“That money got from a negotiation that should have been going back into Medicaid and helping sick children,” Fried said.

As attorney general, Moody had to sign off on the settlement. Fried said public documents show how Moody’s office went to great lenghts in order to separate her from the deal, but that the paper trail still ultimately leads back to her.

“She signed off on it, and there’s plenty of paper documents,” Fried said. “She was right in the middle of this mess. Got rewarded by getting that U.S. Senate appointment, as did James Uthmeier, who got his appointment now to attorney general.”

Fried said Moody’s voting record in the Senate also hasn’t helping her chances of reelection adding that she votes with Trump “almost 100% of the time,” including on his so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (which Fried called the “big BS bill”) which led to healthcare cuts for hundreds of thousands of Floridians. Moody is also a consistent supporter of Trump’s deeply unpoplar war in Iran.

How Democrats Can Overcome Republicans’ Financial Edge

Gibson then asked Fried about the several million dollars that independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont spent from his remaining 2020 campaign war chest to support candidates around the country, including Nixon. He also asked whether Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) had reached out about helping Nixon get across the finish line.

Fried acknowledged that Republicans continue to have a significant financial advantage, and highlighted examples like Byron Donalds receiving $10 million from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin and millions of dollars from Big Tech billionaires, data center developers and major insurance industry donors.

“We don’t play like that, and so we don’t get those types of financial resources,” Fried said.

She confirmed that the money Sanders sent went to the Florida Democratic Party on Nixon’s behalf, and that both the Florida Democratic Party and the Nixon campaign are working in tandem to decide whether those critical resources will be best spent on additional field staff to knock on doors, TV ads, or digital advertising on social media. Fried said her party’s strategy for the last several election cycles has been to invest in building up an army of Democratic volunteers rather than try to match Republicans dollar-for-dollar on commercials.

“If anybody’s asking, ‘Where’s all the commercials?’ Well, at the end of the day, that costs money, and we’d rather put the money on the ground talking to people and not just propaganda on TV,” Fried said.

Fried clarified she hasn’t yet personally spoken with Schumer, but that Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Ruben Gallego of Arizona were both currently in Florida to both boost Nixon and help Democrats up and down the ticket.

Florida Republicans’ ‘Dummymander’ May Have Hurt The GOP’s House Majority

Gibson pivoted to the congressional map Florida Republicans redrew earlier this year, years ahead of the normal redistricting schedule, after DeSantis unveiled color-coded red and blue maps on Fox News. He asked whether the gerrymander had backfired.

Fried said she first sensed what was coming last summer, when she watched DeSantis and Trump discussing on camera during a tour of Alligator Alcatraz whether Republicans should have gotten more seats in the last round of redistricting.

“My spider senses went off, and I said they’re going to play for something,” Fried said, adding that the party immediately began preparing its legal team and Democratic legislators to fight back.

Fried noted that Florida voters added the Fair Districts amendments to the state constitution in 2010, banning maps drawn for partisan advantage. She said DeSantis’s staff openly admitted to lawmakers that they used partisan data to draw the lines, and that neither the House nor Senate sponsor could defend the map during floor debate.

“They know full well that they broke the Florida Constitution,” she said.

But Fried argued that by spreading Republican voters thin to target the state’s eight Democratic-held seats, the GOP created a “dummymander” that leaves several of its own seats vulnerable, since she said Florida has shifted at least 10 points to the left.

“If you’re an R+10 or below, which is about another five to seven seats, this moment may cost you your reelect or that open seat,” she said.

She pointed to Florida’s 16th Congressional District, where Republican National Committee chairman Joe Gruters’s wife is the GOP nominee in an R+7 seat, and where Fried said Democratic candidate Kelly Kirschner is leading in the polls.

“They can end up losing the RNC chairman’s wife in this dummymander that they just had to get through this year,” Fried said.

How Floridians Can Make Sure Their Ballots Get Counted

With many older Floridians voting by mail, and concerns about the Trump administration interfering with the Postal Service and mail ballots, Gibson asked Fried what she’d tell voters worried that their votes won’t be counted.

Fried said the party has had an extensive voter protection operation in place, including attorneys and volunteer poll workers, and used the August primaries as a test run. She also offered an unexpected source of reassurance.

“This is the weirdest thing for me to say,” Fried said. “Don’t anybody cringe when I say this. A little bit of trust in DeSantis on this issue, because he has been so forward on saying that Florida’s voting is the most secure in the country. … So anything less than that, he will have egg on his own face.”

Fried reminded voters that Florida does not count ballots by postmark, so mail ballots must be received by the county supervisor of elections by 7 p.m. on Election Day. She encouraged voters to track their mail ballots, use drop boxes, or vote early to avoid long lines.

“Regardless if you’re voting early, vote by mail, or on Election Day, make a plan, follow through with the plan, and then verify that your vote has actually been counted,” she said.

Why Democrats Can’t Afford to Give Up on Florida

Gibson closed by asking what Fried would say to Democrats elsewhere who are hesitant to invest in Florida, given Republicans’ large voter registration advantage.

“There’s no choice,” Fried said. “Florida has to be back on the map.”

Fried pointed to population growth across the South, noting that Florida, Texas, and other Southern states are projected to gain congressional seats and electoral votes after the 2030 census. Without investment in organizing infrastructure in Florida, she warned, Democrats will struggle to win the House or the presidency.

“If we haven’t — and I use this very clearly — not spent in Florida, invested in Florida, that is infrastructure,” she said. “Otherwise, the math is not going to work.”

Fried also emphasized that roughly a third of Florida voters are independents, and that independents nationwide have been breaking heavily for Democrats.

“When you’ve got 60 to 70% of those independents breaking for Democrats, that’s how we’re winning these elections,” she said.

Finally, Fried argued that Florida has served as a testing ground for Project 2025, from attacks on Black political representation to removing Black history from textbooks and banning books, and that Democrats must win back the state’s diverse Latino communities if they want to expand their coalition.

“For the rest of the nation to see what is happening to democracy, you start here in Florida and you start in the South, because this is where democracy is first lost,” Fried said.

Election Day in Florida is November 3.

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With Donald Trump publicly admitting that the Democrats will take over the House and perhaps the Senate in the November midterms, executive branch employees are already preparing their own legal defense.

“Several of us have had discussions about retaining outside counsel,” one longtime executive branch employee told Raw America on background. “Our fear is we’re going to need it.”

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Both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance are now using the final stretch of the midterm cycle to cater to the lowest common denominator by leaning into racism and bigotry aimed at Democrats. Several top House Republicans are now conceding that their chances of hanging onto their majority have slipped away and that their only hope now is in keeping the Senate. A new leaked audio recording of Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton shows him telling a roomful of lobbyists that both his campaign and his party are drowning. And a Republican congressman in Maryland embarrassed himself after blowing his top at an audience of voters who laughed at him during a debate.

A quick ask before we get to the news: Mark Zuckerberg is continuing to throttle our stories on Facebook after we called him out for sucking up to Trump. Elon Musk’s algorithm is burying our posts while he simultaneously donates hundreds of millions of dollars to Republicans. But your inbox is the one thing they can’t touch, which means every new subscription is one more voice they can’t silence.

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This afternoon at 3:30 PM ET, Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson will be interviewing Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried about how Democrats are aiming to flip Trump’s home state. Watch it live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

Trump Leaning Into Racism and Bigotry in Final Stretch of Campaign

As Election Day draws closer, Trump’s campaign strategy has become increasingly desperate, and he’s now leaning into gutter racism in his attempts to fire up the Republican base ahead of November 3.

The president’s approval rating is at an abysmal 33 percent according to CNN. Most Americans lay the blame at his feet for rising costs of living including food, housing and fuel prices. So since Trump has no record to run on, he’s counting on scaring voters into checking the box for Republicans.

Last weekend in Tennessee, Trump went after Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (who Raw America interviewed in April), saying he likes to call El-Sayed “Mohammed” even though he knows that isn’t his real name. He then insisted he could call the accomplished doctor and former head of the Detroit Health Department “whatever the hell I want.” He took it a step further during an Ohio rally, calling El-Sayed a jihadist.

El-Sayed wrote on social media that the president knows his name and says it every day, and argued Trump was trying to use his name and faith as a way to distract voters from his failed policies that are making life more expensive for everyone.

While headlining a rally in Texas, JD Vance called Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico a “freak” and implied he was gay. Vance may have just been throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks given that Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Ken Paxton is plagued by various corruption and infidelity scandals.

And of course, we saw this week when federal agents raided the Washington D.C. home of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The night after the raid, Trump questioned whether Omar — who is a naturalized U.S. citizen — even had Constitutional rights. Omar reminded everyone that Trump has attacked her ever since her first election in 2018 and is now using the full weight of the federal government against her in a politically motivated investigation. White House staffers insist the president isn’t a racist, but we’re also talking about the same person who spread the racist “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama.

The Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified almost 160 years ago after a bloody civil war fought over the institution of chattel slavery, says every person born or naturalized here is a citizen, full stop. Citizenship doesn’t come with an asterisk for people whose names a president can’t be bothered to pronounce. When the man who swore before the country to uphold the Constitution asks whether it applies to a sitting congresswoman, it’s no longer a dog-whistle. He’s directly telling us which Americans he believes the Constitution is for.

Top Republicans Admit Keeping House Majority Is Effectively Impossible

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives are now privately conceding that their majority will be gone after November 3. Five separate GOP members of Congress told Politico that keeping the speaker’s gavel is effectively impossible, and they’re now simply hoping to hang onto the Senate.

One anonymous senior House Republican confided to Politico that Trump “has made this election all about himself.” Another projected Democrats to have a net gain of roughly 10 seats in November and added that Republicans in new gerrymandered districts in both Florida and Texas are “hanging on with their fingernails.”

It’s easy to see this happening in real time if you follow the money. Republicans already called off ad buys in competitive swing districts held by New Jersey Republican To Kean and Iowa Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks, even though Trump easily won both just two years ago. They also gave up on holding onto the Omaha, Nebraska seat that’s being vacated by retiring Republican Congressman Don Bacon. The main House GOP super PAC ceded its paid ads in Nebraska and Iowa to a Senate Republican group.

Bacon said the people who decided to allocate money elsewhere told him the main issue is Trump’s dismal approval rating. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson, continues to insist the polls are simply wrong.

The last time a president had this much of a drag on his own party down was in 1974, when Watergate cost Republicans almost 50 House seats because voters were sick of Republicans being a rubber stamp for a crooked president. Checking an unpopular administration is what midterms are for in a republic. When lawmakers from the party in power quietly give up on trying to convince the country to keep them in power, it shows they no longer trust the voters they were elected to represent.

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Ken Paxton Tells Lobbyists in Leaked Audio That Republicans Are in Deep Trouble

Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton apparently knows exactly how much trouble Republicans are in.

Rolling Stone recently obtained audio from a September 24 event hosted by a Republican-affiliated lobbying firm in Washington D.C. that was secretly recorded by an attendee who opposes Paxton’s candidacy. In the clip, Paxton tells attendees that Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott is “struggling” against his Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa. He also predicted his party will “probably lose some seats” in the Texas statehouse.

Paxton was also heard pointing the finger at nearly everything when discussing his flailing Senate campaign. He chalked up his lack of success to a bruising primary against longtime incumbent Senator John Cornyn and a slew of negative ads from his well-funded Democratic opponent, James Talarico. Other clips from that same meeting that have since been leaked to various media outlets have Paxton complaining that Cornyn wants him to lose in November, and that Trump’s war with Iran and record-high diesel prices are hurting his chances of winning. He also confided to attendees that Republicans would cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security if they held onto their majorities.

Money is actually the least of Paxton’s problems. Spending in Texas’ Senate race alone has already approached nearly half a billion dollars. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk alone poured $10 million of his own money to Paxton’s super PAC. A Paxton spokesperson dismissed the Rolling Stone report as a partisan hit job based on cherry-picked audio recordings.

But the stubborn fact remains that Paxton spent the Fourth of July in London with his mistress, continues to duck reporters’ questions and still has yet to agreed to debate Talarico despite offers from three different networks. If Texas does end up electing a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in the 21st century, Paxton would only have himself to blame.

Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security in 1935 and deliberately made sure workers funded it with their own paychecks so that no politician would ever have the gall to get rid of it. Almost a century later, a candidate propped up by the world’s richest man is telling a closed room of lobbyists that working-class Texans need to just “suck it up” and lose the retirement fund they’ve been paying into their whole lives. That isn’t just an embarrassing gaffe, but a Republican accidentally revealing their playbook.

GOP Congressman Blows Up at Audience for Laughing at Him During Debate

Last night, Republican Congressman Andy Harris of Maryland had a rough debate night. During a League of Women Voters forum in Cambridge, the incumbent Republican and chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus faced off against Democratic challenger Dan Schwartz before a crowd of roughly 200 voters.

When Harris tried to blame Democrats for high diesel prices that spiked after Trump launched his war iwith Iran, the audience could be heard laughing at him. Harris appeared furious and walked toward one audience member, calling him rude. He then accused the crowd of infringing on his First Amendment rights. The moderator eventually had to pause the questions and ask the candidates to calm their supporters in the audience.

Schwartz landed some significant blows on Harris. After the Republican lawmaker defended stricter work requirements for social safety net programs, Schwartz reminded the audience that Congress had taken so much vacation this year that its own members wouldn’t meet those very same work requirements.

The mood got even more tense after the event concluded. Harris refused to answer some reporters’ questions, calling them silly. He also told one reporter she didn’t have permission to record him, and even had some of his staff sic police officers in the journalist when she continued to record him.

In 1964 the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case that debate about public officials has to be fully uninhibited, robust and open to the public. That includes laughing at a congressman who blamed Democrats for high fuel prices caused by his own party’s war in the Middle East. The First Amendment was expressly written to safeguard citizens from government censorship, not to protect Andy Harris from his own constituents. A lawmaker who calls the police on a reporter for recording him at a public debate is telling us exactly what he thinks of both.

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Donald Trump is sounding the alarm that he could potentially be the last Republican president if Democrats take back Congress in November and the White House in 2028. A far-right network suddenly cut away when a man at that same Trump rally started trash-talking the president on live TV. Trump’s new White House press secretary bombed her first official briefing so bad that even some White House staffers are predicting she won’t be there for long. And six Republican senators are now coming out on the record against Trump’s deal to import diesel fuel from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

One more thing before we get to today’s news: will you make today the day you upgrade your free subscription to a paying one? We’re up against a small group of pro-regime billionaires who are scrambling to devour every newspaper, TV station and website they can, because they believe they should be the ones who get to decide what you get to know. We’ll never answer to or sell out to them, but that also means readers like you are essential to keeping our newsroom running.

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If you missed it, be sure to check out our interview today with First Amendment expert Bob Corn-Revere, who defeated Donald Trump in court last month. Watch and/or read the summary below or by clicking here.

Trump Says He’ll Be ‘Last Republican President’ if Democrats Win Back Congress

At a Monday rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump warned his crowd that he’d be “the last Republican president” if Democrats are successful in 2026 and 2028. According to Trump, Democrats could add 12 new electoral votes and four more U.S. senators along with approximately 10 new House members before proceeding to “rig the Supreme Court.” He asserted that Democrats were in charge, they would put 23 justices on the Court.

No one is quite sure where he came up with that figure. Top Democrats have called for expanding the Supreme Court, though the number most commonly touted is 13 justices. It’s important to note that nothing in the Constitution requires the Supreme Court to have a set number of justices, and that Congress has both expanded and shrunk the court several times in the past.

The current nine-member Supreme Court has been place since the late 19th century, when the national population was a fraction of what it is today. Democrats are primarily aiming to expand the Court to correct Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices during his first term — one of which was stolen from Barack Obama after then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold a confirmation vote for Obama’s third Supreme Court appointee, Merrick Garland.

Trump was campaigning in Youngstown, Ohio for U.S. Senator Jon Husted and Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who are both in close races despite Trump winning the Buckeye State three times. While multiple Republicans are keeping the president at arm’s length due to his plummetting poll numbers, both Husted and Ramaswamy are hoping Trump can rile up the MAGA base before November.

Trump also notably endorsed embattled Republican Congressman Max Miller, who was on hand at the rally but didn’t speak. Miller has been accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife, who said he harmed both her and their young daughter. Miller has denied the allegations. Trump would only thanked Miller for coming, calling it “very good.”

Far-Right Network Panics After MAGA Rallygoer Starts Bashing Trump on Camera

That same MAGA rally in Youngstown produced another viral moment, though this one happened on the right-wing network Real America’s Voice (RAV). The network’s Bobby McNeily was interviewing several people waiting in line to get into the venue when he came across an older man named “Brian,” (not Raw America’s White House correspondent) who made it clear he was “absolutely not” a Trump fan.

McNeily was caught off-guard and asked Brian what he hoped to hear from Trump. Brian laughed and said he predicted the president would utter “a bunch of rhetoric, a bunch of lies, a bunch of the same old script.” He then went on to say he was there to witness firsthand the kind of claptrap Trump would be yammering on about for the next two years, “as if the first two haven’t been bad enough.”

Brian told RAV he wasn’t affiliated with any political party until JD Vance appeared on the 2024 ticket with Trump. After that, he said he registered as a Republican so he could vote against Vance in a primary, thus giving himself two separate opportunities to “eliminate all these MAGA idiots.”

That comment was apparently too much for RAV’s producers, who immediately cut away from Brian mid-sentence while he was telling McNeily about how he was vehemently opposed to anyone Trump endorsed.

Real America’s Voice was founded during Trump’s first term in the White House, and has since carved out a reputation for itself as one of the most sycophantic media outlets in the country today. Its on-air talent includes Steve Bannon, MAGA social media influencer Jack Posobiec, and former Fox host Eric Bolling, who was forced out of the network after he was accused of sending inappropriate photos to his female colleagues.

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Trump’s New Press Secretary Humiliated in Disastrous First Briefing

Katie Zacharia, who is Trump’s new White House press secretary, had a particularly rough debut today. She was behind the lectern for less than 15 minutes, and observers couldn’t help but notice her stilted delivery, frequent uncomfortable pauses and her difficulty in even making it through her own prepared remarks.

At the end of Zacharia’s painful soliloquy, she only took three questions. All three were from notoriously right-wing outlets like Fox News, the Daily Mail and Breitbart. She then abruptly ended the briefing and walked offstage.

Even some Trump White House personnel were underwhelmed. One official anonymously confided to MS NOW’s Jake Traylor that Zacharia either needs to improve quickly or she’ll “break Scaramucci’s record,” which is a reference to former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci’s famously short 11-day tenure. Scaramucci even offered his take, writing on social media that “the clock is running” on Zacharia’s time as Trump’s top spokesperson.

Several others in the White House told CNN host Kaitlan Collins they didn’t know how long Zacharia would be behind the lectern, with one saying her first briefing was “brutal.” One former senior Trump staffer told MS NOW’s Pete Alexander that Zacharia would be “a train wreck” as press secretary.

The reviews weren’t much better elsewhere. Journalist Aaron Rupar said Zacharia’s briefing was like a real-life version of a Saturday Night Live cold open. Mother Jones’ Inae Oh wrote that Zacharia appeared to be physically uncomfortable reading her opening statement, saying that her time onstage made her predecessor Karoline Leavitt “seem like a rhetorical genius.”

6 GOP Senators Rail Against Trump’s Deal with Putin

We’re also seeing a widening rift in GOP support for Trump’s foreign policy agenda. A bipartisan group of 12 U.S. senators — including six Republicans — sent Trump a letter this week calling on him to withdraw his deal to import diesel fuel from Russia.

The senators insisted in their letter that buy buying diesel from Vladimir Putin, the United States is directly giving Moscow more money to pay for its war on Ukraine while simultaneously doing nothing to lower prices for American drivers at the pump. The senators framed the deal as “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies” and demanded the president officially rescind it.

Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and John Cornyn of Texas all signed it, along with Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Chris Coons of Connecticut. Armstrong’s signature is notable given that he’s a freshman lawmaker likely aiming to run for another term, whereas Sens. Cornyn, McConnell and Tillis are all retiring from public office.

Collins, Murkowski and Tillis previously joined Democrats in a statement issued Sunday slamming the deal as being in direct conflict with existing U.S. law that bars importing energy from Russia until Putin stops his war with Ukraine. When reporters directly asked the president today whether Moscow could use the proceeds from the diesel deal to buy more weapons to use against Ukraine, Trump refused to give a direct answer.

The timing of the deal is critical. Given that control of both chambers of Congress will be decided on November 3, Republicans who have until now been almost in total lockstep with Trump’s foreign policy are now scrambling to distance themselves from him.

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Watch Our Interview with First Amendment Expert Bob Corn-Revere:

• Defeating Trump’s lawsuit against Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register

• Trump’s lengthy history of using the court system to silence journalists and critics

• Whether the Supreme Court could enable Trump to ratchet up his attacks on press freedom

• ABC and Disney’s lawsuit against Trump’s FCC and Chairman Brendan Carr

• A Republican senator’s request for the FCC investigate ABC News for reporting on Trump’s sons

• The White House’s attempt to lock out reporters from CNN, Politico, MS NOW and Raw America

• Why media companies, law firms and universities who give in to Trump’s bullying always lose

• Trump’s DOJ prosecuting nonviolent protesters in Minnesota and Chicago

• How people who lack the funding to hire lawyers can still fight back

Raw America is only able to bring you in-depth conversations like these — with an attorney who won a legal battle against Donald Trump — because of the support of our paying subscribers. Between now and Election Day, we’re aiming to reach 10,000 subscribers so we can keep this work going well into the future. We’re making it even easier to become a paying member by offering 20% off an annual subscription until we hit our goal. Will you take a moment to invest in independent journalism?

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How Corn-Revere Beat Trump in Court

In late September, an Iowa judge dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against both the Des Moines Register and J. Ann Selzer, who is one of the most respected political pollsters in the country. Trump accused both the Register and Selzer of committing consumer fraud after Selzer’s final poll showed he could potentially lose Iowa to then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, though Trump ended up winning the Hawkeye State.

Corn-Revere made sure to credit lawyers who represented the Register, who litigated the case alongside Corn-Revere and FIRE, before explaining why Judge Scott J. Beattie ruled in favor of the defendants two years after the election.

“The case went through a lot of procedural wrangling, went up to federal court, got sent back to state court, and then ultimately we had briefing and a hearing before Judge Scott Beatty in Polk County, Iowa,” Corn-Revere explained. “And he issued a 64-and-a-half-page opinion dismissing all claims very decisively.”

Gibson noted that in Corn-Revere’s statement after the ruling, he called Trump’s lawsuit “laughable” and said the First Amendment “doesn’t allow anyone in government, least of all the president, to punish people under the banner of ‘fake news.’” Corn-Revere agreed with Gibson’s assertion that the president was using the power of the courts in an attempt to bully his critics into silence.

“I don’t want to get bogged down in legal jargon, but I think the appropriate legal term for this lawsuit is ‘forehead-slappingly stupid,’” Corn-Revere said. “And it goes way back to Donald Trump’s tactics from long before he was in politics.”

The First Amendment expert reminded viewers that long before Trump entered politics, he sued the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic for calling one of his proposed real estate developments ugly, and then later filed a suit against a writer who, in Trump’s view, undercounted the eventual president’s net worth. Corn-Revere said Trump has been been behind roughly 30 defamation suits against journalists since the 1980s and has yet to win a single one. He has, however, pressured defendants into giving him millions of dollars in settlements since he was reelected.

“He now has the machinery of the federal government, which he can bring to bear and pressure people into making settlements of otherwise frivolous claims,” Corn-Revere said. “The question now with Trump 2.0 is whether or not people have the staying power, whether or not they will stand up and fight for their rights.”

Trump Setting His Sights on a Major Press Freedom Case

The president has repeatedly said he wants to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, the ruling that allows journalists to cover public officials without fear of being financially ruined by frivolous lawsuits. With the midterms exactly three weeks away and Democrats poised to retake one or both chambers of Congress and hold hearings that will reveal unflattering details about both Trump and his business dealings, Gibson asked if it was a possibility that the 6-3 conservative supermajority Supreme Court could re-hear the case and give Trump the result he wants.

Corn-Revere emphasized his belief that the case’s underlying precedent in the case is airtight, but acknowledged that the origins of the case have a lot in common with press freedom today. As the prominent First Amendment attorney explained, that case stemmed from efforts by segregationists in the Deep South to punish newspapers in the North for covering the Civil Rights Movement. The Times initially had to pay Alabama Public Safety Commissioner L.B. Sullivan $500,000 in a libel verdict over minor factual errors, though the Supreme Court ultimately overturned it in its landmark 1964 ruling.

“It got to the point where the Times was not sending reporters to the South to report on the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. “What we’re seeing today is sort of a return to those kinds of tactics, use of bogus litigation by government officials to try and silence speakers and journalists that they don’t like.”

Corn-Revere explained the high bar to prove defamation is exactly why Trump opted to sue Selzer and the Register for consumer fraud instead of libel. He added that while Justices Neil Gorsuch (a Trump appointee) and Clarence Thomas (who was appointed by George H.W. Bush) have expressed an interest in re-litigating the case, the rest of the Supreme Court has indicated a lack of interest in doing so.

“I don’t think that precedent is in any danger,” he said.

Trump’s FCC Chair Engaging in ‘Record-Breaking Levels of Hypocrisy’

The conversation then pivoted to Disney and ABC’s ongoing lawsuit against Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and its chairman, Brendan Carr, who authored the section of Project 2025 pertaining to the FCC. Gibson recounted how the FCC is now making the move to force the license renewal process for ABC’s eight owned stations many years ahead of schedule after Trump has consistently singled out the network for critical coverage of his administration.

Corn-Revere said while it’s common for there to be some litigation surrounding license renewal, an FCC threatening to revoke licenses for political reasons is uncharted territory.

“There has never been an effort like this that was so nakedly political and on such a broad scale to go after a network’s licenses. It really is unprecedented,” he said. “And for Brendan Carr, who used to fancy himself to be a free speech warrior before he became chairman, it is, I think, record-breaking levels of hypocrisy.”

He laid out how the FCC has consistently escalated its efforts to clamp down on Trump’s critics. First there’s rhetorical pressure, then investigations, followed by a re-interpretation of the rules specifically aimed at shows like The View, and finally the surprise demand for early broadcast license renewals.

This issue is uniquely personal for Corn-Revere, who was once chief counsel to then-FCC chairman James Quello in his career in the 1990s during the Clinton administration.

“To see the FCC’s rules and policies being misused to such a great extent, it is really astonishing to see,” Corn-Revere said.

Gibson noted that even though the FCC has no jurisdiction over online media, Republicans like Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio seem to think otherwise. This week, Moreno sent a letter to the agency asking it to investigate an ABC News online report about the billions of dollars in federal contracts that have consistently been awarded to companies linked to the president’s eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

“It is using simply the coercion that we’re going to make life miserable for you if you don’t do what we say,” Corn-Revere said of the Trump FCC. “It was historically understood that the FCC was designed to be a bipartisan, non-political agency, therefore to manage the law in a very technical way, and it was supposed to steer clear of politics. Those norms have been broken, and that has to be restored, regardless whether or not courts hold them to the letter of the law.”

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The Battle to Restore Press Freedom at the White House

Trump announced on social media last month that he would be barring reporters from CNN, Politico and MS NOW from accessing the White House. He’s also revoked credentials for Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem without any notice or explanation. Gibson noted that at the state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping, David Ellison — who became the new owner of CNN’s parent company last week — sat at the table with Trump and Xi while CNN’s reporters were locked out of the event.

Gibson then asked about the effects of media organizations presenting a united front in the face of Trump’s actions. Corn-Revere noted that early on in Trump’s second term law firms and universities who caved in the face of executive orders targeting them ended up suffering anyway.

“Those who capitulate don’t really fare all that well,” Corn-Revere said, pointing out that prominent firms lost major clients while other firms that stood firm didn’t. He also pointed to four separate law firms that sued and later won injunctions.

“I think they won not just in court; they also won in the court of public opinion,” he said.

“If you look historically at the way the First Amendment has developed, the history of our free speech protections has been written by the ones who stood up,” Corn-Revere continued. “The ones who took the risks that they might lose, but still forged those really critically important First Amendment principles that we all rely on today.”

Standing Up and Fighting Back Is a Winning Strategy

Gibson highlighted the recent example of J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register winning in Iowa state court as proof that fighting back against Trump’s attacks on the First Amendment can pay bug dividends, and contrasting their efforts with law firms like Paul Weiss giving in. He also noted that while ABC settled Trump’s lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s comments about writer E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict against Trump, its parent company, Disney, is now fighting back against Trump’s FCC.

Corn-Revere also heaped praise on media outlets that expressed solidarity toward the reporters and outlets that had their press credentials revoked, calling it “very heartening and very impressive.” And he further warned that ceding ground to authoritarians will only offer the illusion of temporary safety.

“Giving in to a bully is really short-term thinking. It isn’t going to be a sound strategy for the long term,” the FIRE attorney said. “Even though you’re rolling the dice and you don’t know what a court may do, the only sure path to security is to stand on your rights.”

Trump Prosecutes Ideas Instead of Acts

Gibson observed that Trump’s attacks on basic Constitutional rights go well beyond newsrooms. He pointed to the case of the Minnesota 15, in which anti-ICE protesters who helped organize nonviolent resistance and surveillance efforts to the administration’s immigration crackdown this winter have since been charged with federal crimes. Gibson warned that federal prosecutors, appear to be treating anti-fascism as a crime, even though Antifa is an idea and not an actual organization.

“That’s part of the problem,” Corn-Revere said. “The overall focus of this administration has been to try and criminalize ideologies and not acts.”

The First Amendment attorney made it clear that while acts of violence or physical attacks on police can be punished under the law, things like Trump’s September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum that allows for surveillance of all anti-American, anti-capitalist and anti-Christian beliefs is a far more sinister threat to the First Amendment.

“You see those kinds of directives being followed by ICE and other agencies in going way overboard in how they both conduct surveillance and how they crack down on dissent,” he said.

Gibson then pivoted to the case of the Broadview Six, in which six anti-ICE protesters were arrested outside the Broadview ICE detention facility in the Chicago area — one of whom was then-Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh.

The federal judge overseeing the case found evidence that prosecutors had potentially manipulated the grand jury process to secure what appeared to be politically motivated charges. This led to Trump’s Justice Department dropping the case entirely rather than be further embarrassed in the discovery process. Gibson asked whether a future Democratic-led Congress or Democratic attorney general could press for sanctions or disbarment for the prosecutors involved in the case.

“It is possible that legal officials who have misused the law can face sanctions like disbarment. We’ve seen that kind of thing happen in the past,” Corn-Revere said.

However, he countered that merely switching the party in charge won’t fix the problem by itself. FIRE — which Corn-Revere reminded viewers is a nonpartisan organization — has also been involved in litigation against Democratic officials, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $787 million defamation suit against Fox News as it originally included a consumer fraud allegation.

“What I hate to see is the two parties, even though they are going at each other, learning the bad habits of each other,” Corn-Revere said. “What we try to do is maintain the same set of legal principles that binds both sides and protects we the people from that kind of overreach, regardless of which direction it’s coming from.”

How to Fight Back When You Can’t Afford a Lawyer

In Vermont, protesters have been consistently mobilizing outside of an ICE surveillance center that gives field agents data to track down and arrest immigrants. The Intercept reported last week that both state and federal prosecutors have officially filed criminal charges organizers of a planned week of action right before it was set to begin, prompting allegations of the government using the machinery of the legal system to chill dissent. Gibson asked Corn-Revere how people who can’t afford to mount a legal defense against the government can survive when the state clamps down on them.

“That’s one of the reasons why organizations like FIRE exist. We represent people without charge, and we take as many cases as we possibly can,” Corn-Revere said. “It has been a boom time for that kind of thing.”

He described how one man — David Streaver of Rochester, New York — sent an angry email to the acting director of ICE after agents gunned down U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Several months after that email, ICE agents showed up at his door with a notice warning that he may have broken federal law by threatening a public official.

“There was no threat here, nothing even remotely like a threat,” Corn-Revere said. “It was simply someone registering a protest with the government.” FIRE took the case and won an injunction against ICE.

To close the interview, Gibson asked what Corn-Revere would say to people who are hesitant to join a protest, or even contact their elected officials out of fear that the Trump administration could come after them.

“First of all, I want to say that I understand the risks, and it is not easy to show fortitude when you have, especially, this kind of belligerent overreach by government officials,” he said. “But it pays to think more in the long term as well, and to think over the course of American history, it has been those people who are willing to stand up that made sure that the principles that this country was founded on have continued.”

Help Us Keep Bringing You Perspectives Like These

The Trump administration is counting on its aggressive attacks on the First Amendment to scare Americans away from exercising their Constitutional rights. But as Bob Corn-Revere has shown, even those without the resources to fight back in the face of these tactics can not only stand up — they can win. News outlets owned by MAGA billionaires like David Ellison won’t platform people like Corn-Revere, but we can. Because we answer to no billionaire or corporate parent. We answer only to readers like you. And we’ll keep it that way as long as we’re around.

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A new poll finds that most Americans believe Donald Trump cares more about using his office to enrich himself than about actually leading the country. A top Republican super PAC is officially giving up on several GOP incumbents with 21 days to go before the midterms. A new report confirmed that Ken Paxton spent New Year’s Eve 2024 in Dubai with his mistress and two fugitives from US law who donated to his campaign. And new data shows that Trump voters who live near data centers are now lining up to support Democrats in the midterms.

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Be sure to tune in today at 1 PM ET for our live interview with Bob Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where he and Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson will discuss Trump’s attacks on the First Amendment. Watch it on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

Majority of Americans Believe Trump Cares More About Making Himself Rich Than Helping the Country

A newly released poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research has found that roughly six in 10 American adults believe Donald Trump is illegally or unethically profiting from the presidency. Only about two in 10 respondents think what he’s doing is legal, and a similar share say they still aren’t sure.

Those numbers come after the president’s June financial disclosure filings show Trump made more than $1 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures after his administration weakened regulations on the industry. One of those ventures resulted in a $500 million investment from a company with ties to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. Additionally, Trump’s real estate empire made eight foreign development deals during the president’s first year back in office, with several of those projects taking place in authoritarian or one-party states.

Just over half of survey takers — 56 percent — said Trump has prioritized adding to his personal wealth since returning to the White House. Only about a quarter of respondents said Trump was putting the country first, and only one in 10 told pollsters Trump was focused “a lot” on people like them.

Oscar Delgado, a Ford employee in Lansing, Michigan, voted for Trump in 2024. But now, he believes Trump is consumed by greed and isn’t putting America first. He told the AP, “I wanted a change, but I didn’t expect this change.”

Barbara Thaxton, who is an 87-year-old independent voter based in Florida, told AP-NORC survey-takers that the president’s wealth keeps growing while ordinary Americans are barely making ends meet. The White House maintains that Trump has zero conflicts of interest, even though the president told The New York Times that he doesn’t think anyone really cares about that.

The authors of our Constitution saw all of this coming, which is why they wrote the Foreign Emoluments Clause into Article I to prevent federal elected officials from accepting any payments or gifts from foreign countries without the express consent of Congress. They knew a president who could be bought off by a king or a prince wasn’t really working for the american people anymore. Thankfully, it seems most Americans still understand that.

GOP Super PAC Officially Gives Up on Reelecting 3 Republicans from Swing Districts

With the midterms right around the corner, Republicans are walking away from their own members of Congress. The New York Times is reporting that Trump-aligned and House GOP leadership-affiliated super PACs have officially withdrawn all remaining ad buys for Congressman Tom Kean of New Jersey and Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa after their own polls showed them losing ground to their Democratic opponents.

This is the first time in the 2026 cycle that national Republican PACs have abandoned sitting incumbents. Last week, they pulled money out of the Omaha, Nebraska-area seat being vacated by retiring Republican Congressman Don Bacon. That means Republicans have essentially surrendered three districts they currently represent, even after aggressively carving up multiple House maps aimed at padding their narrow majority.

Republican-aligned groups also cancelled their plans to spend money in an attempt to oust Democratic Congressman Greg Landsman of Ohio and Democratic Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan (who Raw America interviewed last week). The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), which is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s super PAC, is now re-allocating $10 million into 16 deep-red districts where Democrats are gaining ground. That includes the Texas seat held by Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz, which Trump easily won by 18 points in 2024. Republicans now apparently feel the need to spend millions of dollars to prevent it from flipping.

CLF president Chris Winkelman insists the strategic retreat keeps Republicans competitive in the battle to get to the majority-clinching number of 218 seats. But a party pouring money into districts it previously seen as safe red territory isn’t a sign of confidence heading into November. One of the Times’ sources suggested Republicans could be abandoning even more seats this week.

When the Supreme Court ruled in the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause case that federal courts had no say in partisan gerrymandering, Republicans saw that as a green light to pick their own voters rather than allowing voters to pick them. But the current midterm cycle shows the limit of that strategy, because while anyone can redraw a map, you can’t redraw what people think of your leadership.

These stories won’t be mentioned on David Ellison’s CBS Evening News or seen above the fold in Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times. Raw America can bring you this reporting because we answer only to you, the reader. If that matters to you, we’re making it easier than ever to join by offering 20% off an annual membership. Will you commit right now to supporting independent journalism with a paying subscription?

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Ken Paxton Caught Partying with Mistress and 2 Fugitives Who Donated to His Campaign

Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign now has another headache to deal with. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Paxton spent New Year’s Eve of 2024 at a luxury hotel in Dubai alongside his mistress, Tracy Duhon, and two fugitives from American authorities who were indicted on federal healthcare fraud charges.

One of those men — healthcare executive Anosh Ahmed — donated $190,000 to Paxton most recent campaign for attorney general, including $25,000 just a few days after federal prosecutors indicted him. Ahmed and his associate Sameer Suhail were both criminally charged with embezzling $15 million from a Chicago-area hospital. Ahmed was later charged for allegedly participating in a much more serious scheme that involved roughly $195 million in payments for fraudulent Covid-19 tests. He’s pleaded not guilty to all charges. Since that night with Paxton, both men have since made their way back into the U.S. where their trials are pending.

Paxton hasn’t directly addressed the video of him in Dubai, though Paxton senior advisor Nick Maddux told the Journal that Paxton, like Donald Trump, has been a victim of political persecution.

Trump apparently had knowledge that there could be damaging revelations about Paxton coming down the pike ahead of the election, prior to him endorsing the Texas attorney general over longtime incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Trump shrugged off those warnings, and Democratic state representative James Talarico is now holding a narrow but consistent lead in the latest polls. If he wins on November 3, Talarico could become the first Democrat to win any statewide election in the Lone Star State in more than 30 years.

Paxton has significant amounts of baggage. The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives impeached him in 2023 on abuse-of-office charges before he was acquitted by the Texas Senate acquitted him. Former Paxton aides who were punished for the whistleblower complaint that led to his impeachment won $6.6 million in a lawsuit, though Paxton continues to deny their claims. State Senator Angela Paxton, his wife of 38 years, filed for divorce alleging he committed adultery. Additionally, his net worth grew from less than $175,000 before his first campaign back in 2002 to around $5.5 million by 2018. He also owns 15 properties valued at $9 million on a public employee’s salary.

A Senate Republican PAC is now running ads from Angela Paxton urging voters to support Texas’ GOP ticket. However, she never once utters the name of her estranged husband.

Texans have seen this show before. When the Sharpstown stock fraud scandal broke in 1971 and exposed numerous Lone Star State leaders trading favors with a Houston-based banker, voters responded the very next year by kicking the governor out of office and replacing roughly half of the Texas House. That’s a good reminder that corruption is only normalized if voters stop punishing it.

Trump Voters Angry About Data Centers Line Up to Vote for Democrats in Midterms

Finally, data centers appear be costing Republicans significant numbers of votes. The Economist matched nearly 150,000 respondents from its weekly YouGov survey with their closest AI data center. Since May, support for Democrats among likely voters who live within a few miles of a data center has jumped from 54 percent to 61 percent. That’s significant, the nationwide shift was only from 53 to 55 percent.

The jump in Democratic support among Trump’s MAGA base is even more noticeable. About 17 percent of his 2024 supporters who live in the vicinity of a data center now say they would vote for a Democrat, compared to just 6 percent of Trump voters who don’t. People have legitimate concerns about how data centers are overburdening local power grids, making their utility bills skyrocket and broader concerns about artificial intelligence as it pertains to putting people out of their jobs.

The president has previously said that any community that opposes the development of new data centers could become backwards and poor. However, that message doesn’t appear to be resonating with even his own supporters. Democratic candidates in competitive House and Senate races have made data centers a key focus of their campaigns. That includes Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District, Colorado’s 4th Congressional District — which Republican Lauren Boebert currently represents — and in Ohio’s 15th Congressional District. Voters in those communities aim to make data center operators pay for new power and to give local residents more autonomy over where data centers get built.

Americans fought a similar battle back in the 1930s, when a small group of giant utility holding companies were gouging working families in order to build their own business empires. Congress responded by passing the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which FDR signed into law. Whether it’s a power trust 100 years ago or a tech billionaire’s server farm today, the people who live next door to those facilities shouldn’t be shackled with the bill for some billionaire’s fortune.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. If you haven’t already, please tap the ❤️ and it restack so we can break through the algorithm and reach the readers who really need to hear these stories.

Make sure to catch our live interview today at 1 PM ET with Bob Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where he’ll discuss Trump’s attacks on the First Amendment and what you can do to fight back. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

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Good evening. I’m John Byrne, in for British Chris. If you’re reading this on Substack, do us a quick favor: tap the ❤️ and restack this newsletter so we can get these important stories in front of more people. Those two small clicks help tremendously.

Today, a Republican group accidentally spent $25,000 on ads for Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins ads in the wrong Portland, on the complete other side of the country. Donald Trump is apparently planning to fire Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece amid an embarrassing corruption scandal. A Republican senator from Ohio wants Trump’s FCC to investigate a news outlet for reporting on Trump’s sons winning Pentagon contracts. And Christian leaders across the country are condemning the Trump administration’s plan to livestream a firing squad execution.

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Republican Group Accidentally Buys Susan Collins Ads for the Wrong Portland

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine is in one of the tightest races of her 30-year career, and the people trying to keep her in office just mistakenly reserved $25,000 worth of ads on the wrong side of the country.

Republican super PAC Defending Main Street, had its media vendor place digital ads for Collins in the Portland, Oregon, market, rather than in Portland, Maine.

NBC News initially reported on the error after a Portland, Oregon, resident posted on social media that she’d seen five different ads attacking Collins’ Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, in one day. According to Google’s Ads Transparency Center, the ads ran for four days across several Oregon ZIP codes and were seen more than a 1,000,000 times before anyone noticed.

Sarah Chamberlain, who is president and CEO of the Republican Main Street Partnership, told NBC she was “absolutely furious” over the error and would never run an ad for Collins in Portland, Oregon, “for Christ’s sake.” The vendor that bought the ads, Cross Screen Media, said the ad buy was “100 percent our mistake” and refunded Defending Main Street to the tune of $25,909.61.

The timing couldn’t be worse for Collins, who’s seeking a sixth term in the U.S. Senate. She debated last week with Jackson, the former president of the Maine Senate, and one moment in which Jackson pointed out how Trump’s tariffs on Canada are hurting Mainers went viral. Decision Desk HQ estimates Jackson has a 54 percent chance of ousting Collins.

Trump Reportedly Scrambling to Replace Scandal-Plagued Ambassador

Former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle’s days as U.S. ambassador to Greece appear to be numbered.

Guilfoyle, who was once engaged to the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is now facing multiple allegations of corruption and of using her ambassadorship to fund her luxurious European lifestyle.

Sources told the New York Post she’s on “very thin ice” with the president. One source told the Post that top White House officials are “p—d off” and looking to replace her. The Associated Press reported that botj Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have contemplated firing her, and the State Department has reportedly opened an official inquiry into the allegations.

According to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal, Guilfoyle asked Kentucky businessman Eric Deters for $100,000 to pay off her American Express bill ahead of her confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Deters was apparently trying to resolve various tax-related and legal problems at the time. However, he said he really wanted Guilfoyle’s help bringing back a doctor who had fled to Pakistan so he could file a medical malpractice suit against him.

Deters ultimately never paid Guilfoyle’s bill, saying it would end his marriage. He’s since called the former fiancee to Donald Trump Jr. a “wicked, evil person” who operates on a “quid pro quo” basis. Additionally, embassy staff in Athens have accused Guilfoyle of fostering a hostile work environment and of using her “Trump card” to intimidate anyone who tries to question her.

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GOP Senator Wants ABC Investigated Over Report on Trump’s Sons Getting Pentagon Contracts

Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio is now asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to investigate ABC News over a report about Trump’s sons winning a lucrative Pentagon contract.

ABC’s initial report on October 7 found that companies backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump had won more than $6 billion in Defense Department contracts, and that the venture firm tied to Trump Jr., 1789 Capital, held a major stake in the firm Anduril Industries.

ABC pulled the story and republished a revised version on October 9 with a new headline and an editor’s note noting that there were errors in the prior version pertaining to certain investments, contracts and timelines. The new piece says 1789 Capital put $50 million into Anduril as part of a $2.5 billion funding round, making Trump Jr.’s investment fairly small when taking into account that the company in question was valued at more than $60 billion.

In a letter this weekend to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, Moreno said the story was personal to Ohio because Anduril is currently building a factory worth more than $900 million in Pickaway County, just south of Columbus. He compared ABC’s correction to a “comically botched cover-up” akin to something from Soviet Russia and complained that the editor’s note was “buried,” even though it was placed above the first paragraph of the article.

The FCC admits on its own website that its authority over news accuracy is narrow, that federal law bars it from carrying out direct acts of censorship, and that online outlets fall outside the jurisdiction of its news distortion policy. Additionally, honest mistakes are beyond the agency’s purview. Still, Carr’s FCC has a pattern of hounding broadcasters dating back to 2025, and ABC’s parent company Disney is currently in the midst of a lawsuit suing the agency over what it alleges is an unconstitutional review of its broadcast licenses.

Christian Leaders Condemn Trump Administration’s Plan to Livestream Execution

Finally, faith leaders are loudly condemning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, who was sentenced to death for killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in an attack at Fort Hood in 2009. Trump is reportedly asking his faith advisors whether he should go along with the broadcast.

Rev. Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church Dallas, who is one of the president’s closest informal spiritual advisors, voiced his support for the public execution and argued that the death penalty is “God’s command.” He told The Dallas Morning News that the more people who watch, the better. Trump went on to repost Jeffress’ comments on his Truth Social platform. Franklin Graham refused to outright condemn the idea, and instead pivoted to attacking what he called Hollywood’s “culture of death.”

However, numerous other religious leaders loudly disagreed with the entire plan. Archbishop Paul Coakley, who is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the plan a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” Walter Kim of the National Association of Evangelicals warned it risks turning a solemn state duty into a public spectacle. Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy of the Catholic Mobilizing Network compared it to the horrors of lynching in the Deep South and to public executions in authoritarian countries.

Hasan’s execution is scheduled for December 3, which would make it the military’s first execution by firing squad since 1945. Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation says six soldiers are already seeking religious exemptions to keep them off the firing squad, and he expects as many as 180 could file. Vice President JD Vance said he wouldn’t watch a livestream, while Trump told reporters he doesn’t care how Hasan dies “as long as he goes.”

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Federal agents just searched Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C. home in what appears to be an immigration-related investigation related to paperwork her father filled out decades ago. An Air Force major who stood on the Capitol steps in full uniform calling for Trump’s impeachment is now being illegally held in solitary confinement for 24 hours a day, according to his attorney. With three weeks to go before the midterms, Republicans are scrambling to defend seats once viewed as deep-red, and one GOP lawmaker blames Trump for dragging the whole party down. And retiring Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina says the president may be breaking federal law by easing sanctions on diesel imported from Russia.

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Federal Agents Carry Out Immigration Raid at Ilhan Omar’s Home

This morning, agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HS) raided Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home and executed a search as part of what the Justice Department maintains is a criminal fraud investigation. Fox confirmed the raid by posting video of agents in HSI jackets outside what it identified as the congresswoman’s residence.

A DOJ spokesperson confirmed the raid to the network, saying HSI “executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice” as “part of an ongoing federal investigation.”

Federal agents have yet to officially give a reason for the search, But Fox reported that investigators are apparently looking into immigration-related paperwork Omar’s father filled out several decades ago when she was just a child.

The context here is important: Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have spent years accusing Omar of fraudulently obtaining her citizenship and have fantasized in public about denaturalizing the congresswoman and removing her from the country. Omar has repeatedly denied the fraud allegations, but the president continues to drag them back into the news by launching personal attacks on a woman who, along with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, became one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress in 2018.

There’s also the timing around the midterm election that’s just 22 days away. Control of both chambers of Congress could potentially flip to Democrats, and this administration has a lengthy track record of weaponizing the legal system against its critics. Reuters has consistently tracked Trump’s retribution efforts dating back to January of last year, so it’s hard for this president to argue he’s not abusing federal law enforcement agencies by using them as a club to bludgeon his political opponents.

Presidents have gotten in trouble for this in the past. Back in 1798, John Adams’ Federalists locked up Vermont Congressman and Irish immigrant Matthew Lyon under the Sedition Act for criticizing the president. Voters responded by reelecting him from his prison cell and kicking the Federalists out of power. A government that uses the full weight of law enforcement to intimidate the opposition weeks before a major election is making it clear that it believes prosecutors rather than voters should decide who sits in Congress.

Air Force Officer Who Urged Congress to Impeach Trump Being Held in 24-Hour Solitary Confinement

While we’re on the topic of people who’ve gotten in trouble for criticizing the president, let’s discuss Air Force Major Jason Watson.

Watson was arrested in full uniform on July 1 on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He held a sign that reading “Impeach. Convict. Remove” while calling for Congress to remove Trump from office. Then on August 18, one day after he doubled down on that criticism in a CNN interview, the Air Force put Watson in pretrial confinement.

Now, Watson’s attorney, Christopher Mutimer, says his client is being held in solitary confinement for 24 hours a day. Mutimer told CNN that even when Watson gets an hour a day to eat or exercise, “he’s alone.” He added that Major Watson is simulataneously looking at the loss of his liberty, getting kicked out of the U.S. military, losing his benefits and possibly even spending years behind bars.

Prosecutors have officially charged Watson under three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). That includes the rarely used Article 88, which prohibits officers from uttering “contemptuous words” against the commander-in-chief. The administration wants to try him at a general court-martial, which is the military’s version of a civilian felony trial.

But Mutimer says the government is actively violating Article 13 of the UCMJ, which states that no service member awaiting trial can be confined in conditions “any more rigorous than the circumstances require.” When a judge rules that pretrial confinement crossed a line into actual punishment, the court can award credit for time served against any sentence. Keeping Watson in 24-hour isolation — which a United Nations expert has once said is akin to psychological torture — could certainly qualify him for time served if nothing else.

The Air Force has said Watson is presumed innocent, but it hasn’t confirmed Mutimer’s assertion that his client is being kept in solitary confinement. Last month, a hearing officer recommended that most of Watson’s charges should be included in a general court-martial while calling for others to be dismissed. Mutimer is aiming to have his client’s case moved to a special court-martial, which is less severe. He’s citing the example of Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who criticized military leaders over the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan and eventually pleaded to lesser charges.

Watson called his protest against Trump a matter of conscience. He told CNN that everything worthwhile “is going to cost something,” and that before taking action, he asked himself what would be the highest price he was willing to pay. There’s currently no trial date set.

A century ago, the U.S. Army court-martialed Billy Mitchell for publicly accusing his superiors of criminal negligence. 20 years later in 1945, Congress voted to award him a gold medal because he was actually right all along. Locking an officer in solitary confinement for an act of conscience doesn’t improve military discipline, but rather it makes it look afraid. A military that’s afraid of the truth is poisonous for democracy.

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GOP Congressman Says Trump ‘Dragging the Party Down’

Republicans are looking more nervous by the day with the midterms just around the corner.

With 22 days left until voters head to the polls, CNN is reporting that the GOP has been forced into triage mode to save deep-red districts and states that have long been viewed as impossible for Democrats to win. They’re also abandoning their previous plans to try and flip purple districts represented by Democrats.

Republicans are expected to lose their slim majority in the House of Representatives, with voters telling pollsters they’re furious about both the ongoing war with Iran and higher costs for basic needs like food and fuel. Their Senate majority isn’t looking much better, with even longtime GOP strongholds like Kansas and Texas now within the margin of error. Some Republicans are now expressing fears that the president’s constant campaign rallies are doing the party more harm than good. One unnamed House Republican running for reelection confided to CNN that “Trump is dragging the party down.”

It’s clear to see what’s happening if you follow the money. The Senate Leadership Fund, which is the key Republican super PAC for Senate races, has now pulled back all of its ad spending in the swing state of North Carolina and poured at least $10 million into Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic U.S. senator since 1932. It’s also now spending $5 million in ruby-red South Carolina, where incumbent Senator Darline Graham is in a tight race with Democrat Annie Andrews. Republicans are also pulling out all the stops in Texas, spending more than $100 million in an effort to bolster Attorney General Ken Paxton’s race against Democratic state representative James Talarico as the latter continues to enjoy a slim lead in the latest polls.

In the last month alone, Trump has traveled to the Lone Star State three times to help Paxton. The embattled Texas Attorney General has been dealing with the fallout of relentless drips of leaked audio from a private fundraiser with GOP lobbyists. One unnamed White House adviser told CNN that they hoped the Iran war would’ve been over by now, and resented that Republicans are having to expend valuable resources to hang onto seats in reliably red states like Texas.

The Cook Political Report is now predicting Democrats to edge out Republicans in 18 separate House races. That includes five seats in states Trump won like Iowa and Pennsylvania, and a rural red district in Washington state. Democrats are now also seeing their polling leads continue to climb in Georgia and North Carolina. Mary Peltola may be the first Democrat to win Alaska since 2008.

Michigan-based Republican strategist Jason Roe, who is helping Congressman Tom Barrett in his tight reelection battle against Democratic nominee Will Lawrence, told CNN the midterm outlook for the GOP is far more grim than he anticipated. He added that if Republicans end up losing Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, there was never any chance they could’ve held it.

The White House insists all of the panic is overblown. Trump’s political team predicts the polls will become more favorable to Republicans once their base tunes in. They’re currently hoping to accomplish this by sending Trump into deep-red districts to hold rallies aimed at firing up the GOP base.

However, the president is staying far away from the swing state of Maine, where longtime incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins is trying to eke out a win over Democrat Troy Jackson by keeping the White House at arm’s length. Trump’s team is reportedly now telling Republicans they’re better off making their own cases to voters. One source told the network the final weeks of the election cycle will be “hand-to-hand combat.”

Right up until the Seventeenth Amendment was fully ratified 113 years ago, state legislatures and party bosses picked U.S. senators in smoke-filled backrooms, while locking ordinary voters out of the process. The panic currently unfolding in both Kansas and Texas is exactly why the 17th Amendment was written in the first place. No seat was ever meant to be safe from the very same voters bearing the bulk of the costs for an unpopular war and shouldering higher prices for groceries that they never asked for.

Republican Senator Accuses Trump of Breaking Federal Law

Our final story: a sitting Republican senator is now all but accusing a sitting president of violating federal law.

Outgoing Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday to call out the president for temporarily easing sanctions on Russian diesel exports. The White House said it was importing Russian diesel as a way to bring down record-high diesel prices that spiked as a result of his war with Iran. Since the war began, the Iranian government has severely restricted commercial traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

The North Carolina senator said there’s now “a legitimate case” to be made that Trump is breaking the law. He appears to be referencing both a 2022 executive order barring the importing of Russian fuel, along with legislation signed into law just last month named after the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham that prohibits the U.S. government from making investments in the Russian energy sector.

Tillis also made it clear he’s holding Trump’s legislative priorities hostage over the move to import diesel from Russia. He said if the president wants his support for military funding and a deal to keep federal agencies open after December, the president needs to understand this is a line in the sand and that he won’t be the only Republican voting against the administration.

He’s not wrong: A bipartisan group of senators including Republicans Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and John Curtis of Utah along with Democrats Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sent a joint letter to the White House demanding the administration cancel its deal with Russia. Senators argued that the United States shouldn’t give Putin “a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.” Outgoing Republican Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska also said it was “morally wrong” to prop up Putin’s economy in the midst of his war with Ukraine.

The deal came after Trump called Putin, with the latter announcing that he would put 300,000 tons of Russian diesel fuel on the global market, with another 500,000 tons on the way next month. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the deal on Fox and Friends, saying the White House would use all the legal authorities it has to bring down prices. However, multiple energy market analysts say the move won’t bring prices down over the long term.

The president also attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the weekend and suggested Ukraine should get a new president. Tillis countered that if Trump really wants to lower fuel prices, he should cut a deal with in Iran and recognize that Vladimir Putin — not Zelenskyy — is responsible for the Ukraine war.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office also heaped criticism on the agreement, saying it directly contradicts the joint efforts of Ukraine, Canada, and other European allies to end the war, and that Trump is helping to bankroll Russia’s invasion on Ukraine.

Tillis has been a vocal opponent of the administration since announcing last year he wouldn’t seek a third term in the Senate. His term officially ends in January.

In 1952 Harry Truman took control of the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War, prompting the Supreme Court to tell him in the Youngstown decision that even a wartime president can’t override laws passed by Congress. If a president can ignore a sanctions law the moment it becomes inconvenient for him, then laws become mere suggestions. Every autocrat is watching Trump and taking notes.

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The Undertow Is Coming for Republicans

Trump has a line he’s been repeating at rallies: vote as if I were on the ballot.

A 24-year-old Texas grad student who voted for him in 2020 told The New York Times this week he’ll do exactly that: “Not vote.”

The Times sent Sabrina Tavernise to southwest Michigan this week. Nearly three dozen interviews found few people still enthusiastic about Trump.

Lindsay Kronemeyer knocked doors for Trump in 2016 and 2020. The only yard signs in her deep-red county this year are for a judge. “He’s just not there in my head anymore,” she said.

At Kent County GOP headquarters, bags of brochures sit in a pile because nobody will pick them up.

“There’s very low energy on the Republican side,” a party official said.

Then there’s Jim Pasek. He’s 80, a retired plant maintenance worker, and he voted for Trump twice. He watched Trump start a war he promised he wouldn’t. Gas prices have shot up to five dollars, which Trump calls chump change.

“He’s not making sense,” Pasek said. “It confuses me, and then I just get disgusted and tune out.”

His granddaughter works three jobs and has struggled to find a house she can afford.

Politico Charlie Cook has a name for this: the red undertow. It’s the Trump brand going under, and it will “pull many Republicans under” with it.

The Times/Siena poll, one of the most reliable, has Democrats up by seven among registered voters, and up by nine among the likeliest to show up.

I won’t oversell it. Trump’s loyalists have dodged pollsters before. But the signs are looking good.

An undertow only matters if somebody’s swimming the other way. This week, three Democrats stood up.

James Talarico Took the Bible Back

James Talarico is 37. He taught middle school on San Antonio’s West Side, went to seminary, and served four terms in the Texas House. He’s running for Senate in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide since 1994.

Talarico invokes religion in a way Democrats haven’t done in years. His stump speech quotes the Gospel of Matthew: “The greatest among you will be a servant.” Then he says this: “That is a radical idea in a world obsessed with power, and wealth, and status.”

He also recently nailed Elon Musk: “Why do we have a trillionaire when veterans are sleeping on the streets? The reason poverty exists is not because we can’t feed the poor, it’s because we can’t satisfy the rich.”

We put that clip up Thursday. It took off.

Talarico has had the flu since late September. On Wednesday night, Trump flew to San Antonio and mocked him, telling a crowd he was “throwing up all over the place,” then demanded on Truth Social that he “immediately report to a Debate Stage.”

Talarico’s answer, Thursday morning: “President Trump just said Ken Paxton should debate. I agree. Ball’s in your court.”

Talarico has accepted four debates. Paxton hasn’t accepted one. A Republican polling firm had Talarico up three this week.

Democrats need four seats to take the Senate, and the map doesn’t work without Texas. And in a year about corruption, he’s running against the living example of it.

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Deb Haaland Kept Her Word to the Farmers

Under President Biden, Deb Haaland was the first Native American Cabinet secretary: Secretary of the Interior. If she wins New Mexico, she’ll be the first Native American woman elected governor of any state.

Haaland won her primary with 78 percent of the vote. The last Albuquerque Journal poll has her up six in her gubernatorial race.

Haaland’s biography echoes a life every candidate claims to understand but rarely lives: a single mom on food stamps who sold homemade salsa and cleaned her child’s preschool to pay her tuition.

“It’s expensive to be poor,” she said when she rolled out her affordability plan. “I wish I had all the money I paid in bank fees when I only had $1 in my account.”

On Wednesday, Barack Obama endorsed her. On Thursday, she skipped the one scheduled TV debate, and Republicans hammered her for it.

Here’s how I see it: she’d offered eight dates since July. Her opponent took none. The station picked a day she’d already promised to farmers and ranchers in southern New Mexico, and she went to see the farmers.

“I’m keeping my word to the New Mexicans I made a commitment to months ago,” she said.

That’s been her mantra all year. The New Mexican rode with her through eight towns in oil country, places Democrats don’t go.

In one town, a Trump voter came out to see her anyway: “I’m just tired of politicians who are just playing a part.” A Republican running for sheriff put it simpler: “In rural New Mexico, for me, it’s who shows up.”

Haaland’s race matters. When Washington cuts Medicaid and food assistance, governors are often the final line of defense. New Mexico could elect someone who knows what food insecurity feels like firsthand.

Jon Ossoff Put Mike Collins on Trial

We’ve talked about Jon Ossoff here before. Ossoff was supposed to be the most vulnerable Senate Democrat, but he’s polling so well the prediction markets give him a 95 percent chance to win.

Ossoff threw the typical Democratic playbook out. Thursday night, he set it on fire.

Ossoff opened his first debate with Republican Mike Collins by announcing “a united Georgia will hear the trial of Mike Collins.”

Twelve minutes in, he glanced at the clock: “We are now 12 minutes into this debate and we still haven’t heard an explanation as to how the tariffs are helping Georgia families.”

“Family farms in Georgia are getting crushed,” he said of the Iran war, which Collins voted for seven times. He added that Trump “unleashed federal agents to kill citizens on our streets with impunity.”

And Ossoff repeated what reporters have documented for a year: that neo-Nazi material was tied to Collins’s family and office.

“Imagine running for the U.S. Senate while neo-Nazi propaganda is disseminated to an audience of millions from your home,” he said.

For a decade, Democrats in tough states were told the way to survive Trump was to blur their liberal affiliation. Ossoff tests the opposite idea: that you can say exactly what’s happening and win anyway.

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Hours after Donald Trump eased sanctions on Russian diesel to bring down fuel prices before the midterms, Ukraine set the export terminal on fire. A focus group of Trump’s own voters watched one of his taxpayer-funded TV ads, and one of them asked for Pepto-Bismol. More than a week after a young plague researcher died in Siberia, Russia still hasn’t said what killed her. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s FDA is proposing to let some toxic chemicals be added straight to food without a safety review.

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Trump’s Plan to Salvage Midterms With Russia’s Help Literally Explodes Into Flames

Donald Trump has a problem three weeks before Election Day: fuel prices. His solution was Vladimir Putin.

The administration eased sanctions on Russian diesel. A few hours later, Ukrainian drones hit the NZNP Rostovsky oil export terminal in Rostov-on-Don, according to Raw Story.

“This is a products export terminal, exactly where the diesel would leave Russia under the deal,” wrote The Hormuz Letter, an account that covers oil markets and posted video of the blaze.

Ukraine had telegraphed it, too. Ukrainian military sources warned earlier in the day that Trump’s plan to use Russian diesel to cut U.S. prices before the midterms “will bear no fruit.”

The New York Times reported Friday that record diesel prices are hitting farm states just as harvest season starts. Fuel costs have soared since Trump launched his war against Iran, and Republicans are now desperately trying to fix the map as their internal polling gets worse.

So the president started a war that sent fuel prices soaring, then turned to Moscow for relief.

MAGA pundit Brian Glenn summed it up without seeming to notice what he was saying. Trump struck a diesel deal with Russia, he wrote, and “Ukraine then bombs terminal to which the diesel would flow from. There you go.”

There you go, indeed. Trump tried to buy his way out of a midterm problem with Putin’s diesel. Ukraine lit the loading dock on fire.

Trump’s Own Voters Say His Taxpayer-Funded Ads Make Them “Nauseous”

If you’ve watched an NFL game lately, you’ve seen them: “public service announcements” starring Donald Trump, paid for by you.

Sarah Longwell, a former Republican pollster and publisher of The Bulwark, wanted to know how they’re landing. So she gathered Florida voters who backed Trump in 2024 but now disapprove of the job he’s doing, and showed them one.

The spot pulls from a 2024 rally speech in which Trump vows to “demolish the deep state” and “drive out the globalists.”

“The second that ad started and he started talking I literally just got nauseous,” said a Trump voter named Paul, according to Raw Story. “I need some Pepto-Bismol.”

Dena called Trump “power hungry.” Bob suggested swapping the “paid for by the U.S. government” label for “definition of a narcissist.”

The rest of the country agrees. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found Americans oppose spending taxpayer money on election-related TV ads featuring the president, 86 to 9.

Trump said this week that his super PAC will cover future airings. He won’t be reimbursing taxpayers for the ones that already ran.

A couple of the participants said they plan to vote for Democrats. One, Ramiro, went further.

“Even if the Republicans don’t win for the next ten years, it’s probably best to wash these people out,” he said.

That’s a Trump voter, in Florida, after watching a Trump ad. Money well spent.

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Russia Still Won’t Say What Killed a Plague Researcher

Darya Shipilova was 28 and worked at the Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East in Irkutsk, where she tested antibiotics against the bacterium that causes plague.

She died of pneumonia on October 2. More than a week later, Russia hasn’t said what caused it.

First, the reassuring part. No other known cases have surfaced, and fears of an outbreak are starting to recede, The New York Times reports.

Russia’s public health regulator says her remains didn’t test positive for any of the dangerous pathogens she worked with, plague included. Officially, it was pneumonia of unknown origin.

That’s the part the World Health Organization can’t get past. If plague is ruled out, asked the WHO’s Maria Van Kerkhove, “what did she actually die from?”

Experts say Moscow should know by now. Raj Panjabi, a Biden White House public health official, said Russia can presumably sequence a genome within days.

“They’ve not shared the results, and that’s concerning,” he told the Times.

There’s a reason the world is jumpy. Russia is one of the few countries still working on biological weapons, according to the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment.

People briefed on U.S. intelligence told the Times there’s no indication the Irkutsk institute was doing bioweapons research.

Even so, the regional governor declared the matter closed on Thursday, saying the WHO had confirmed there’s no risk to public health. The WHO says Russia hasn’t given it enough information to assess the risk at all.

His own constituents weren’t buying it. “X-Files, nothing to see here,” one wrote under his video.

More than six years after Covid upended the world, a government that won’t answer a simple question about a dead lab worker isn’t going to get the benefit of the doubt.

RFK Jr.’s FDA Wants to Let Toxic Chemicals Into Food Without a Safety Review

In August, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took a victory lap. He and the FDA declared “promises kept” for closing a notorious loophole that let food companies certify their own ingredients as safe.

What they didn’t mention was what else was in the proposed rule.

According to The Guardian, it quietly expands a different loophole, the “threshold of regulation” exemption.

Today, that exemption lets companies use dangerous compounds without review in food packaging and processing equipment, as long as they aren’t carcinogenic and stay below 0.5 parts per billion.

The proposal would let those chemicals be added directly to food — as flavorings, preservatives, emulsifiers and more.

The trouble, advocates say, is that plenty of chemicals do damage at far lower levels, including hormone disruptors linked to brain damage in children.

There’s a track record here. In 2005, the exemption was used to allow perchlorate, a rocket fuel chemical, in the giant plastic sacks that move grain around farms.

The FDA’s own data later showed more samples of kids’ cereal contained it, and at higher levels. Even very low exposures are linked to lower IQ scores in children.

The agency reapproved it anyway.

“They did not make our food safer,” said Maria Doa, a scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund.

The man who built a movement on getting toxic chemicals out of food is now presiding over a rule that lets more of them in.

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If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that’s exactly the point. A president who turned to Putin to rescue his midterms. His own voters sickened by ads he billed to taxpayers. A government that won’t say what killed a plague researcher. And an FDA quietly opening the door to toxic chemicals in your food. Facebook and X have effectively shut down our distribution, because two billionaires decided what you get to see before November. Election Day is 24 days away. Becoming a paid subscriber is the most direct way to fight back, and it puts this in your inbox where no algorithm can touch it. We’re behind on our October goal and running out of time, so subscribe or upgrade right now for about 22 cents a day. Then share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Become a paid subscriber right now to make your support go even further.

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One more thing before you go: hit the ❤️ and restack this edition. It’s what pushes these stories past the algorithm and into the feeds of people who’d never otherwise see them.

I’m John Byrne. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.