Trump's assault on American democracy. Democracy struck back this week, as chronicled in the featured post. Some pundits may be tempted to claim Trump's overwhelming defeat means that the assault-on-democracy theme was always overblown. But while Trump's attempts to cheat may have come to little or nothing, that's because they were beaten back in the courts and by a motivated electorate. When police stop a gang from robbing a bank, you don't say "No harm done" and send them home to plot their next attempt.
Climate change. Climate change wasn't a big issue in this campaign, but Trump's wide-ranging assault on reality was. Climate change denial/minimization is one of the many ways the regime lies to us. Going forward, Democrats need to connect obvious lies like "the economy is booming", "prices are going down", and "Iran has been defeated" to claims that climate change is a hoax.
Israel/Palestine. Israel used to be admired by nearly all American voters, and any hint that a candidate might not like Israel or the current Israeli government was quickly punished. That's not true any more. In Israel itself, the anti-Netanyahu coalition has been given the first chance to form a new government, but that will be a heavy lift. If successful, the new government will also be right-wing, but possibly less inclined to commit war crimes.
Ukraine.Phillips O'Brien points out that new Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is one of the most pro-Putin anti-Ukraine voices in the administration. "Trump is trying to get many of his most terrible priorities, including helping Putin, achieved as soon as possible, to pre-empt the powers of the new Congress." He also points out that the long-predicted manpower crunch may be hitting -- in Russia. Russian casualties rise every month, and are now outrunning recruiting rates.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about the Blue Wave
I don't talk about any specific races in that post, but one that gave me particular joy was watching Abdul El-Sayed win the Senate race in Michigan by 7 points. El-Sayed is such an obviously talented communicator. Millions of dollars spent on raising bigotry against him did not get under his skin. He stayed focused on his message: Money out of politics. More money in your pocket. Medicare for All. Even the last-minute betrayal by Haley Stevens (God knows what she was thinking) couldn't throw him.
And in the end, neither the money nor the bigotry could prevail with Michigan voters.
El-Sayed's win also blew up a number of myths, including that progressive candidates can't win in battleground states. It's true that El-Sayed ran about 4 points behind the Democratic governor candidate Jocelyn Benson, but Benson is a pretty attractive candidate herself, and didn't face nearly the money-and-bigotry headwinds El-Sayed saw.
I also enjoyed seeing James Talerico and Adam Hamilton win big. These two campaigns might reset how the media covers the relationship between religion and politics, and maybe even how the public thinks about that relationship.
Since Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority to support Ronald Reagan, "religious" and "conservative" have been almost synonymous. And yes, White Evangelical Christians still went 80-20 for Republicans. But Talerico and Hamilton clearly ran on the liberal Christian message -- the message Jesus actually gave in the gospels rather than the message that has been manufactured and put in his mouth more recently. Jesus talked at length about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger, but the gospels don't bother to record anything he might have said about abortion or homosexuality.
Plenty of conservative ministers described Talerico and Hamilton as "fake Christians". But I think they've got that backwards.
Democracy Defenders Fund's Norm Eisen takes offense at the WSJ editorial board pooh-poohing the threat Trump posed to the elections.
The reason “Trump didn’t steal the elections” is because we & the pro-voter coalition stopped him EIGHT times over the past 21 months.
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Jobs reports continue to be good. The unemployment rate is 4.1%.
Local communities have been fighting data centers, so corporations may start putting them in places where no one lives: the Great Lakes.
A Microsoft project set up off the coast of northern Scotland in 2018 found that after two years, server failures were reduced by 87% compared with on-land datacenter equivalents. Microsoft executives saw the project, which ended after two years, as an unmitigated success.
Computing throws off heat, so cooling is a constant issue. Underwater data centers, especially in cool climates, all but solve the cooling problem.
However, at some point you start heating up the lake, which changes the eco-system in unpredictable ways. Thinking of Lake Erie as an inexhaustible source of cooling is similar to the way polluting factories used to think of the air or the rivers as nothing more than vehicles for taking pollution "away", as if "away" never had to be accounted for.
Tesla built its Texas lines for a planned capacity of 250,000 trucks a year, and Musk once talked about doubling that.
But the Cybertruck never sold more than 40,000 units in a year, and many of those were internal purchases by SpaceX, another Musk company. So Musk essentially was juicing the numbers by selling Cybertrucks to himself.
Remind me why we're supposed to believe this guy is a genius.
and let's close with with a victory lap
On Saturday, the real James "Talifreako" got to interrupt SNL's Trump imitator during the cold open.
Peace will come someday, but not from cutting support for Ukraine. The war will end when Putin gives up his dream of absorbing Ukraine into Russia, when he understands that he cannot win.
Trump's assault on American democracy. Trump has tried to interfere in the midterms in a variety of ways, most of which the courts have beaten back. His outrageous lawsuit to prevent Alaska from certifying its Senate race if Trump's candidate loses got thrown out, though it may reappear after the election. The attempt to get states to put aside ballots from people Trump claims (on flimsy grounds) are not citizens has also not succeeded. Expect shenanigans to continue, and hope the courts are up to the challenge.
Climate change. Natural gas is often touted as being better for the environment than other fossil fuels like coal. But that's only if methane doesn't leak during the drilling and transportation process. The Biden administration increased controls on methane, but Trump is rolling those rules back.
Gaza. The Gaza genocide seems not to have had much traction as an issue in Israel's recent election.
Ukraine. Over the last few weeks, Trump has largely dropped the pretense that his administration is either an ally of Ukraine or a neutral arbiter seeking peace. The "deal" he keeps pushing Ukraine to accept is to surrender territory to its invader. More below.
This week's developments
This week's biggest story is tomorrow's election
The featured post is a watch guide if you plan to spend Tuesday night in front of a television, as I do. Apparently most of my friends consider this a form of torture, so my envisioned watch party isn't happening. Maybe you'll have more luck.
Trump has been holding rallies in all the red states that threaten to defect from his coalition, and he is getting increasingly unhinged. The American public is like the frog that doesn't realize it's slowly being boiled: We've watched Trump's mental deterioration happen gradually, so it doesn't shock us the way it should. He tells the story of a simple dementia test where he repeated back five words they gave him, and claims doctors were wowed that he could do it. "Almost no one can do it. But I can because I'm a freaking genius."
In his blog The Farce, Jason Sattler offers a message for any of his fellow Jews who happen to live in Michigan: Religious bigotry, even if it takes the form of Islamophobia, will eventually hurt Jews. He asks them to reject Mike Rogers' campaign of hate and vote for Abdul El-Sayed.
We know that Islamophobia feeds the same beast as Jew hatred for the same cruel, senseless aims. We know this even as our community struggles to come to terms with even how to discuss the horrors of October 7 and the war crimes that followed. And we know this tidal wave of hate is only coming because Mike Rogers can’t run on anything else.
Corruption is a big issue in this campaign, but it should be bigger. Trump's net worth has more than doubled since he started his second term, and that doesn't count how much his sons and son-in-law have made.
Elon Musk has spent over $440 million this year trying to buy a Republican Congress, nearly $35 million on Ken Paxton alone. He is clearly afraid of being subpoenaed by Democrat-led congressional committees to explain things like temporarily cutting off Ukraine's access to Starlink for its high-speed drones, or being called to account for the deaths his destruction of USAID is causing, or whatever happened to all the sensitive government data DOGE sucked up.
Musk responded to these possibilities with threats:
Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.
One look at that tweet tells me everything I need to know: Musk has too much power. Concentrating that much power in one unelected individual is a threat to the Republic.
It’s pretty clear you won’t admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.
In his first administration, Trump tried repeatedly to undo the sanctions that the Obama administration had placed against Russia after its annexation of Crimea. But his administration and the Republican caucuses in Congress were full of people who respected the Russia threat and stood in his way. He also sided with Putin's claims against the conclusions of the US intelligence agencies.
By the time Trump took office for the second time, in January 2025, Putin's invasion of the rest of Ukraine was nearly three years old. During the 2024 campaign, Trump often said he could end the war in 24 hours; once in power, it was clear how he thought the war should end: Ukraine should surrender and give Putin all the territory he had demanded. ("Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognized as de facto Russian".) That is still his position.
The Biden administration had provided something like $200 billion in military aid to Ukraine -- one of its few actions that had bipartisan support in Congress. Trump began scaling that back soon after he took office, and by August of 2025 had cut US support to zero, though the US would continue to sell weapons to its NATO allies, which they would pass on to Kiev. Republicans in Congress, like the late Senator Lindsey Graham, continued to understand that Putin was the bad guy in this situation, so in August they passed the Graham Act giving Trump the power to sanction countries that buy Russia oil.
Trump signed that act, and then -- surprise! -- made a deal for the US to buy Russian diesel itself. Just before the Graham Act was scheduled to take effect, Trump waived all its anti-Russia sanctions.
Although the deal is unlikely to lower diesel prices, it will benefit Putin and Russia. Diesel sales will generate revenue that could be used to prolong the war in Ukraine. Since announcing the deal, Trump has also told Ukraine to stop attacking Russian refineries.
I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because [Zelensky] could have made many deals and for some reason he never does.
At around this same time, Ukraine's high-speed drones lost access to Elon Musk's Starlink/Starshield system, crippling its battlefield operations. Though access was eventually restored, this may have been a shot-across-the-bow warning Ukraine that it had better surrender to Russia.
Support for Ukraine continues to be popular in both parties. But after the midterms are over, Trump may decide he no longer cares what voters think. The master will pull his strings, and even a new Democratic Congress may not be able to interfere.
This Summer and Fall have seen a noticeable and continuing increase in the number of Ukrainian civilians being deliberately targeted and killed by Russian bombing. It is becoming more and more common to have mass casualty events on a weekly basis, and Russian ranged systems are being used to hunt out trains, buses, apartment buildings, etc. ... While we await the grim figure for Ukrainian civilian casualties for October 2026 as a whole, it is clear that 2026 is shaping up to be the worst year for Ukrainian civilian deaths caused by the Russian military since 2022, the year of Russian full-scale invasion. ... This slaughter is a result of Russia’s strategic decision. It is an attempt to break Ukrainian will by killing non-combatants. It is also a primal scream of rage at the Ukrainian people for not bowing down in front of the Russian military and Vladimir Putin.
He further points out how Trump continues to placate the pro-Ukraine Congress and American people by making phony announcements of support. On October 30, for the benefit of the midterm electorate, the State Department announced that 500 of the most advanced Patriot missiles would be sold (not given) to Ukraine -- for delivery in 2030 at the earliest.
and demonstrations in Europe
I was in Paris on my honeymoon when the demonstrations started there. I got emails from home asking if we were OK.
If you've ever been in a city where "riots" are going on, you probably understand how localized such disturbances can be. In the vast majority of the city life goes on normally. That certainly was our experience of Paris, though I gather that things got worse after we left. (Fortunately, we were able to visit the Louvre twice before it temporarily shut down.)
On the way back to our hotel one evening, we happened on a demonstration outside some public building. Neither of us speaks or reads French in any but the most rudimentary way, so the slogans being chanted were hard to make out. The signs seemed to be about children and perhaps homelessness. Later we read that there had been demonstrations against sexual abuse in the schools, so maybe that was one of them. There was no violence and we walked through the center of the demonstration with no sense of danger. The demonstrators we saw were trying to communicate with the larger public, not terrorize it. Later we figured out that on a previous day in a different neighborhood we had walked past one of the shops that burned
Trump and various online provocateurs tried to convince their American audience that this had something to do with immigration.
“The migrants have taken over France,” the president posted on Truth Social. “They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!”
This appears to be pure opportunism on Trump's part. French President Macron denounced "stupid" comments by foreign leaders, presumably meaning Trump and Israel's Netanyahu.
By most accounts, the demonstrations began with a student movement protesting against poor funding for schools, especially high schools. They then spread to a general sense of pessimism about young people's prospects in France, and then to a larger movement of citizens concerned about the high cost of living, largely spurred by the increased fuel prices caused by Trump's war.
None of these concerns should seem foreign to Americans. We just don't have the same mass protest traditions the French do.
Another factor that Americans should be able to identify with: There's no money to satisfy the demonstrators' demands. France is running persistently high budget deficits, and the country faces increased needs in many areas. For example, the sudden unreliability of America's commitment to NATO puts pressure on all European countries to increase their defense spending. And the nation's difficult fiscal situation pushes investors to seek higher interest rates, making the fiscal situation even worse.
The main difference here is that the US runs its deficit in dollars, which its Federal Reserve can create at will. France owes euros, which are controlled by the European Central Bank. That gives the US more short-term flexibility, but it's not clear that our long term situation is any better. For example, in the recently concluded FY 2026, we ran a $2 trillion deficit. We got essentially nothing for that money: We didn't make some major national investment, spend our way out of recession, fight a major war, or deal with some external challenge like the Covid pandemic. Subtract the estimated $47 billion spent on attacking Iran, and it's still a huge deficit. And that's just business as usual.
and elections in Brazil, Israel, and Serbia
Brazil's election was a very pleasant surprise. Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil's Trump. When he lost his reelection bid in 2022, he reacted as Trump had in 2021:
On 8 January 2023, his supporters attacked the buildings of the Supreme Court of Brazil, the National Congress, and the Planalto Presidential Palace to instigate a military coup d'état and reinstate Bolsonaro as president.
Because the Brazilian justice system is less corrupt than ours, Bolsonaro was tried and convicted. He is currently in prison. His sone Flavio ran for president in Brazil's recent election and led after the first round, in which neither he nor incumbent president Lula got a majority. It was widely expected Bolsonaro would win, and would pardon his father just as Trump pardoned all the January 6 criminals in the US.
But instead, Lula won the runoff in a surprise victory. Flavio was ordered to surrender his passport, pending an investigation into a money-laundering scheme. The Trump administration then conspired to spirit him to Florida, where he is expected to set up a government-in-exile.
Remember how upset Trump usually gets about South American countries sending their criminals here?
Serbia's public broadcaster RTV Vojvodina has publicly apologized to viewers for years of one-sided coverage. The statement came after Aleksandar Vucic, who ran for prime minister, lost Sunday's election in Serbia to the student movement. “Public broadcasting has failed to do its job for many years. A lot was left unsaid, a lot was overlooked, information was presented one-sidedly, reporting was uncritical, and the right questions were not asked, or no questions at all. And for that we must apologize to our viewers,” said Eror, as quoted by the TV channel N1.
It's hard to know what to make of Israel's elections held last Tuesday. These were the first elections held since the October 7, 2023. Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud Party lost seats in the Knesset, but remains the largest party. AP reports:
Netanyahu’s coalition, made up of ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, supported strengthening Israel’s Jewish character. It pushed for more settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and allowed for military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews. It also attempted to push through an overhaul of the country’s judiciary in 2023 that drew mass protests.
Eisenkot’s camp promoted a vision where Israel’s Jewish character lives in harmony with its liberal democratic ideals. It promised honest leadership and accountability for Israel’s Oct. 7 failures, vowed to bolster the judiciary and end the military draft exemptions. They also promised to fix Israel’s international standing, which has deteriorated because of the Gaza war and settler violence in the West Bank.
Neither party seems likely to put together a 61-seat Knesset majority without making deal with the Arab parties, which hold 19 seats. The Arabs would never partner with Netanyahu, but Eisenkot has also pledged not to deal with them.
If no one can form a majority, they'll have to hold the elections again.
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Chances are, you've eaten more than your usual quota of chocolate this last week. And maybe you got nostalgic about how good chocolate used to taste back when you were the trick-or-treater collecting candy rather than the homebody handing it out.
Well, apparently it's not just your imagination. New York magazine writer Rachel Handler did a deep dive into how chocolate is made, who makes it, and why it (like just about everything else at this stage of capitalism) is getting enshittified.
It was a sad week for Star Trek fans. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov in the original series, died at the age of 90. And then Wednesday, Patrick Stewart died.
Stewart's Captain Picard wasn't just a beloved character, he represented a new direction, emphasizing exploration and negotiation rather than the more warlike virtues of Captain Kirk. It took a great actor to pull that off, and Stewart was one.
The Justice Department's latest attempt to keep the Hunter Biden case going just failed: The case against two FBI agents that DoJ said lied to Congress about Hunter's laptop was dismissed.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a criminal complaint against two former FBI officials accused of making false statements to Congress about Hunter Biden, saying the investigation that produced the charges was rushed, overtly political and dogged by “critical mistakes.”
“What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said in a scathing ruling from the bench that dismissed the case against former officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides.
Mostly, I try to keep my personal life out of this blog, but occasionally it sneaks in (usually in the Monday Morning Teasers). Today I can't avoid it, because I'm about to take a break longer than any I have taken since I started this blog in 2008. (Interestingly, that first post had the same title Paul Krugman used this week for the post where I found the quote above: "Fear Strikes Out". It's a reference only a handful of people will get, to a book and a movie almost 70 years old. RIP, Jimmy Pearsall.)
As many of you know, or may have gleaned from subtle references, I was married for 40 years to a woman who (after surviving several serious health crises) died unexpectedly almost two years ago. Saturday, I'm getting married again. In October, my bride and I are going to travel around Europe, where I plan to spend as little time as possible thinking about American politics.
I realize I am deserting my post at a key moment. This fall's campaign is a pivotal point in American history. The electorate will either ratify or reject Trump's attempt to put aside the Constitution and establish autocracy. Billionaires are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure we ratify the current regime and its rampant corruption. I hope they will be disappointed.
I'll be back in time to write an election-eve Sift on November 2.
Ongoing stories
Trump's assault on American democracy. This week's assault was against the press, as Trump banned CNN, MS Now, and Politico reporters from the White House, and threatened to add the New York Times and Washington Post to that list. "Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories," he said, attacking the whole notion of a free press. The ban is being challenged in court. Other reporters should boycott the White House in solidarity. I didn't think they would, but maybe so.
Climate change. Climate change has a number of effects you wouldn't necessarily have predicted. One is that waterways are becoming less navigable. Diminished local rainfall is limiting shipping on the Rhine, the Mississippi, and the Panama Canal.
Middle East. The US appears to be staying out of the Saudi/Houthi battle. We'll see what effect this has on world oil supplies.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about interest rates
Wednesday, the Fed raised interest rates for the first time in over three years. The increase was .25%, to a range from 3.75%-4%. Trump appointed Fed Chair Kevin Warsh precisely because he wanted interest rates to go down, not up. So he must be very disappointed.
A quick explanation is appropriate here, since most of the interest rates the average person deals with -- mortgage rates, credit card rates, whatever your bank might pay on your checking account -- are nowhere in that 3.75%-4% range. So what exactly did the Fed raise?
Financial institutions are obligated by law to hold liquid assets that can be used to cover sustained net cash outflows. Among these assets are the deposits that the institutions maintain, directly or indirectly, with a Federal Reserve Bank. An institution that is below its desired level of liquidity can address this temporarily by borrowing from institutions that have Federal Reserve deposits in excess of their requirement. The interest rate that a borrowing bank pays to a lending bank to borrow the funds is negotiated between the two banks, and the weighted average of this rate across all such transactions is the effective federal funds rate.
What the Fed now wants to keep in the 3.75%-4% range is that effective federal funds rate. It has two tools for controlling those rates: First, the interest rate the Fed pays banks on those institutional deposits, called the IORB (interest on reserve balances). Second, the rate the Fed charges banks for loans at its discount window. (Basically, the Fed will loan banks money based on their capital assets. This prevents runs on the bank, where a bank has assets, but can't quickly generate the cash that depositors suddenly want back.)
Those two rates essentially bracket the interest rates the banks charge each other for the overnight loans: The only reason to loan another bank your reserves is if it will pay a rate higher than what the Fed is already paying. But there's also no reason to pay a rate higher than what the Fed would charge you.
Changes in the Fed funds rate tend to ripple through the economy, to all the other rates people pay. That's what we mean when we say the Fed "sets interest rates". It only does that indirectly.
Next we get to why. By law, the Fed has two competing missions: to simultaneously keep the inflation and unemployment rates low.
Basically, high interest rates encourage people to save, while low interest rates encourage people to borrow and spend. More spending means more demand for goods and services, which tends to encourage businesses to hire. But it also makes prices rise, as more dollars chase the same quantity of goods.
High interest rates also fight inflation in another way: The ability to earn high interest encourages foreign investors to keep their money in dollars. That increases global demand for dollars and so makes the dollar more valuable relative to other currencies. That means that the price of imported goods goes down.
Recently, the unemployment rate has held fairly steady at a rate just over 4%, which in general is pretty good. But inflation is also running close to 4%, which the Fed considers too high. Hence the decision to raise rates.
After the Fed raised rates, Trump demonstrated how little he understands about economics by tweeting this on Truth Social:
Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World — BY FAR. Our Country is BOOMING with new Investment! If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word “Deficit” is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are “carrying” almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer. LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST! President DONALD J. TRUMP
That's about as much economic stupidity as I've ever seen compressed into one paragraph. It combines two different elementary misunderstandings: one about interest rates and the other about trade.
First, interest rates have to cover three different things simultaneously
credit risk. That's the lender's insurance that the borrower won't pay the loan back. So if a bank lends to 100 people and one defaults, the interest payments from the other 99 need to cover that loss. This is the only component of interest that Trump recognizes. The US government has been a great credit risk for a long, long time, because it essentially has the power to create the dollars it owes. So yes, if credit risk were the only component of interest, rates could be very low.
inflation. Inflation is currently running at just under 4% (which is almost exactly the Fed's new short-term interest rate). If I loan somebody money for less than the inflation rate, I'm losing money, because the dollars I get repaid are worth less than the dollars I loaned.
compensation for deferred consumption. Suppose we're two kids in our school lunchroom, and I want your candy bar. I could offer to give you back a candy bar tomorrow. But the ability to eat the bar now is worth something. If you could eat a bigger candy bar tomorrow, the deal might seem worthwhile, but otherwise not.
So no, a 1% interest rate would make no sense at all. First principles would lead you to a higher rate than the one the Fed has chosen, not a lower rate.
Then there are the macro-economic consequences. If interest rates were 1%, holding cash would be a losing proposition, so everybody would spend and borrow rather than save. That would increase the number of buyers for everything, which would drive prices up further. Inflation would skyrocket.
Now we come to Trump's trade stupidity: He thinks that we are "losing" whenever we have a trade deficit with some country, and that we'd gain that money back if we just stopped trading with them.
This is something everybody should easily understand from their own experience: I have a trade deficit with my local supermarket, because I buy things from them while they never buy anything from me. I also have a trade deficit with my dentist, with the local coffee shop, and a lot of other businesses. Under Trump's logic, I should just stop trading with them.
The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!
It's hard to judge IQ from a distance, but I can say with confidence that Trump does not know or understand much. That's what happens when you aren't curious and surround yourself with people who only tell you what you want to hear. It doesn't matter how good your brain is if it never engages with the world.
I am reminded of something one of my junior-high teachers said: "Some people are so stupid, they think they're intelligent."
One of the themes is those articles is countries like Canada deciding to go their own way rather than remain in the American orbit. Here's an example: You know those foreign knowledge workers that Trump slapped a $100K tax on? He's saying America doesn't want them. But Canada does.
Remember back in those innocent days of the Biden administration, when it was a major scandal that the president's son might have gotten a job he didn't deserve? Last Monday, ProPublica revealed that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin spent hundreds of thousands of dollars celebrating Don Jr.'s wedding -- including renting a private island and putting on a fireworks display.
A wedding with a guest list only 50 people long -- not even Don Sr. came -- had room for Umar Kremlev, whom Don Jr. described as a "close friend".
The Christian Democrats of German Chancellor Frederick Mertz continue to do badly in regional elections, with voters moving both to the right and the left.
America PAC, Elon Musk’s super PAC supporting conservative candidates and causes, is churning out dozens of digital ads vilifying transgender people and criticizing Democratic candidates over their past support for trans rights in the hopes of driving Republicans out to the polls in November. In less than a week, the group, initially created to support President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign, has released at least 38 social media ads claiming Democrats in competitive midterm Senate races would “put our daughters in danger” and prioritize a “radical trans agenda” if elected. Most of the group’s ads focus exclusively on trans people, according to a review of America PAC’s ads in the Meta and Google libraries.
Two of the ads feature people who are implied to be trans women; it is unclear if they are real actors or AI-generated amalgamations. ... The ads, which portray trans women as drag queens rather than as they are in day-to-day life, follow a recent pattern of AI-generated attack ads targeting Democratic candidates over their support for trans rights. It’s unclear whether these specific ads are AI-generated, but they fall in the uncanny valley of authenticity. At minimum, they present harmful stereotypes of trans women — that they are physically imposing and always wear overdone makeup — to an audience who may not have ever met a trans person.
Appealing to negative stereotypes is key to maintaining bigotry, whether it is Jewish caricatures with big noses or Black characters speaking in jive or plantation-era pidgin English.
Scapegoating is one of fascism's central strategies: Raise people's anger at trans folk or immigrants, and maybe they'll forget about gas prices, how expensive their healthcare is, and that our nation is fighting another pointless war.
Anti-trans, of course, is one of Musk's many bigotries, including racism and sexism. He has never accepted his trans daughter. If you want to see a real trans woman, she looks like this.
Musk is just the biggest example of a larger phenomenon: As other parts of Trump's coalition lose faith in him, billionaires are standing firm.
According to a recent analysis from the Financial Times, “More than a third of the $2.8 [billion] raised for the current 2025-26 election cycle comes from the 20 biggest mega-donors,” 16 of which have “plowed money” into the Republican midterm campaigns, a marked shift from prior cycles. ... A closer look at the donors themselves tells much of the story. The shift is driven primarily by Silicon Valley boodle—particularly money tied to concerns about the regulation of artificial intelligence—as well as special interests like crypto and gambling.
If you're not rich, and the richest people in the country are all putting their weight on one side of the scale, that's a good reason to put your weight on the other side.
If the Kennedy Center story weren't happening in full public view, it would be hard to believe. First, Trump took over the board of the Center, which apparently is something all previous presidents could have done, but chose not to. He politicized the Center, alienating both the artist community that performs there and the Washington-area audience that attends. His hand-picked board added his name to the Center, in violation of the legislation that established it. When a court said no to this, his board tried various other schemes to attach Trump's name to the Center, which the court has also said no to. Then he started talking about tearing it down. He's been quite explicit about it: Put his name on the building or it won't survive.
If we’re going to save the Kennedy Center, I think the Trump administration should be given recognition for doing so.
I can't think of any comparable case for any previous president: Name this thing after me, or I'll tear it down.
Pundits are explaining this as childishness or petulance or some such. To me, it looks like mental illness.
Meredith Blake at The Contrarian has a good summary of the Ed Sheeran controversy. Sheeran himself is about as uncontroversial as a musician gets. But the opening act on his tour was the rapper Macklemore, who made pro-Palestinian statements during a recent concert. This brought down the wrath of the pro-Netanyahu Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, one of the Sheeran tour venues. He organized resistance to Macklemore, who was then removed from Sheeran's tour by the promoter.
Sheeran has claimed that wasn't his decision, and that he doesn't make political statements. Then the other musicians opening for him then pulled out.
The debacle has thrown Sheeran’s tour into chaos and resulted in a rare PR crisis for a musician who is usually about as incendiary as a bowl of oatmeal. But it has demonstrated one thing: despite what Sheeran would like to believe, being apolitical is not really an option for an artist with a global platform in 2026. That’s because many of the artists who do opt to speak out in this climate, particularly on Gaza, face severe consequences, disproportionate backlash, and bad-faith allegations of antisemitism.
and let's close with something generic
Writing new English subtitles to Hitler's breakdown rant in "Downfall" is practically its own genre of political satire. Here's the latest Iran-war version.
Trump's assault on American democracy. The Missouri gerrymandering case (discussed below) shows just how far MAGA is willing to go to seize an unfair advantage. The Luttig article (also discussed below) raises an even darker possibility.
The Iran War. The Houthis seizing control of the south end of the Red Sea is a major development, which I talk about below.
Ukraine.Jared Kushner frames Ukraine as the obstacle to peace, because it refuses to surrender territory to its invader: "President Putin laid out his line of what he wants to achieve. If Ukraine wanted to withdraw to that line, then obviously, you know, we have the rest of the deal set up and put together. Ukraine right now does not want to do that." Kushner views Ukraine's stubbornness as temporary: "right now". Of course, Putin could end the war at any moment by bringing his troops home to Russia, but that goes unmentioned. The Trump regime is on Putin's side and always has been.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about distractions like the Trumpapalooza
where nothing important happened. Trump's dubious offer to give $5K to each adult American if Republicans retain majorities in both houses got a lot of attention, but no one believes it. The only remotely newsworthy thing about the GOP Midterm Convention is that so few people showed up or watched it on TV.
and how AI is going to kill us all
Anthropic is the company that makes the chatbot Claude, while OpenAI makes its rival ChatGPT. Tuesday, Jacob Coxon posted to X:
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. ... The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.
Evan Hubinger, a safety researcher at Anthropic, replied:
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.
It's hard to know what to make of stuff like this. Tech researchers are always claiming amazing positive things are about to happen soon -- Elon Musk has been promising self-driving Teslas since 2013, and they're still only kinda-sorta here. So I can easily imagine their negative predictions are just as off base. ("Did we promise to end the world this year? Sorry. Things came up. Next year for sure.") Something about the industry makes everyone think in grandiose terms. An out-of-control AI can't just kill a few people. It has to be everybody.
The essential problem, as best I understand it, is that AIs don't carry around the breadth of context that humans do. So if you're thinking about some problem at work and the thought "I could just kill everybody" pops into your head as a solution, you naturally take a step back, say "That's crazy", and start over. Because you know that a world where people solve their problems with mass murder is not someplace you want to live.
An AI doesn't know that unless someone has thought to explicitly code that knowledge into it. An AI has a problem to solve, and it does all its thinking inside the box where the problem lives. There is no bigger context in which a solution is judged. So unless someone has thought to constrain possible solutions to avoid mass murder, that might be what the AI comes up with.
This happens in fiction all the time. In the X-Men universe, the Sentinels are robots tasked with wiping out mutants (like the X-Men). But eventually they realize that mutants come from humans, and that some small percentage of human babies will necessarily be mutants. So the only really complete solution to their problem is to wipe out humans.
Anyway, pondering grand dystopian possibilities is probably not the best use of what time you have to think about AI. And these scary headlines distract us from a much more mundane problem: If AI does revolutionize how our society works and how we produce goods and services, who is going to benefit?
Right now, we're on track for a handful of Tech Lords to design the future. If they do, they will almost certainly design it for their benefit, not ours. We can already see this tendency in the existing internet systems. (Read Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, which I reviewed in July. Or read The Nerd Reich, which I have now finished and plan to review soon.)
If you can't help thinking about this stuff, though, and if you're a TPM subscriber, check out what Josh Marshall has been assembling in his Editor's blog. Also, most of these kill-everybody articles are way too vague about how exactly we all end up dead. Noah Smith has got that covered. (Basically, some disgruntled human will want to kill us all, and a superintelligent AI will help him figure out how.)
but we should have been talking about the Houthi advance
On Thursday and Friday, a rapid Houthi advance southwards along Yemen’s western coast resulted in the capture of the port city of Mocha and then the strategic island of Perim in the the Bab al-Mandab strait. Pending a counter-offensive from government forces, the group is now in a position to control shipping through the strait.
Here's why that's important: The north end of the Red Sea is the Suez Canal. The south end is the Bab al-Mandab strait. If Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off shipping through the Persian Gulf, and the Houthis shut Bab al-Mandab, then Saudi Arabia has only one outlet for its oil: the Suez Canal, which makes for a very long trip to markets in East Asia.
And that's only if the Saudis can get their oil to the Red Sea. The oil fields are close to the Persian Gulf, but a pipeline can carry oil across the country to the Red Sea port of Yanuba. That pipeline is currently shut down after an attack from drones apparently launched from Iraq.
The Yemeni government that the US recognizes looked to Saudi Arabia for help, and they looked to the US, who said no. Phillips O'Brien notes that US arms sales to the Saudis are 4% of all state-to-state arms sales in the world. Why wouldn't we step in to help our client state? He speculates:
The reasons for the US unwillingness to step in to help the Saudi government at this moment, when everything in US strategic history would have indicated that the US should, are probably down to American military degradation. The US can barely fight the Iranian regime and protect US bases and forces against Iranian attacks. As such, opening up a new front in the war might be beyond US capabilities. It is not like there is some free US aircraft carrier strike force that can be easily deployed away from Iran to fight the Houthis. The US has already stripped the western Pacific—the cupboard is bare. ... So what we are seeing is a weakening US, having to abandon its key strategic and economic allies, as its flounders around running out of munitions and losing advanced equipment fighting Iran. ...
The Saudis purchased such masses of weapons from the USA not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they believed that this meant that if they were faced with real peril (like they are now) that the US would come to their aid. Now, the USA is too weak to do so. What the Saudis are experiencing will also accelerate a move away from military dependence on America from other states in the Gulf.
The price of oil is rising this morning, and is back over $100 per barrel. This is yet another Iranian move that the Trump regime failed to anticipate.
and what just happened in Missouri
So we all remember last summer, when Trump was pushing all the red states to redraw their congressional maps to make them even more gerrymandered. Missouri stepped up with H.B.1, a bill designed to eliminate a Democratic seat (currently held by a Black man, Emanuel Cleaver) in Kansas City. So the 6-2 Republican advantage in the state's delegation should grow to 7-1.
The Missouri Constitution, however, contains a provision that says that the people of the state “reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided.”On Dec. 9, 2025, a coalition of Missourians who sought to overturn H.B. 1 submitted a referendum petition that contained more than 300,000 signatures — more than enough to put it on the November ballot.
So in a law-abiding world, H.B. 1 becomes a ballot proposition rather than a law, and the fall elections are held using the 6-2 maps. Prior to the MAGA fascist era, that's what would have happened under a secretary of state from either party. But Missouri's SoS Denny Hoskins is MAGA, so he did a very Trumpy thing: He came up with a bogus re-interpretation of the law that made an exception for what he wanted to do. So: the ballot proposition is invalid and H.B. 1 is a law that applies this fall.
But even then, there's a clear responsible path Hoskins could have followed: announce his decision in plenty of time to let the courts rule on it before the primaries on August 4. Instead, though, Hoskins announces on August 4 itself and holds primaries using the 7-1 maps.
On Sept. 3, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion holding that voters do have the right to overturn redistricting legislation by referendum, that the petition was sufficient to put the referendum on the November ballot, and — as a result — “H.B. 1 is not the law and has never been the law.”
So Missouri appeals to the U. S. Supreme Court, but that noted liberal justice Brett Kavanaugh refuses to issue a stay on the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling. Again, in a law-abiding world that's the end of the story. But not here.
On September 8, a Trump-appointed federal judge finds federal grounds to throw out the 6-2 maps, and orders Missouri to proceed with the 7-1 maps. Hoskins sends an email to local election officials instructing them to do that. The Trump-judge's order winds up back at the Supreme Court, which stays that ruling, restoring the 6-2 maps. Hoskins' argument in that case is that restoring the 6-2 maps would create chaos, given that (due to his own bad-faith actions) the 7-1 primaries have already been held.
The Missouri Supreme Court has a hearing on whether Hoskins is in contempt, and even there, Hoskins' attorney won't commit to following the court's order. Finally, after being found in contempt, Hoskins agrees to obey the law. The 6-2 maps, somehow, will be used in November.
That's a sort-of-happy ending, but French draws a broader conclusion: Going forward (like in the mail-in ballot dispute, for example) we shouldn't get too comfortable just because the laws are on our side and the courts are mostly enforcing them. We can expect MAGA to play chicken with the courts, creating chaotic situations and then insisting on outside-the-law outcomes to deal with the emergency they themselves caused.
and Judge Luttig's warning
Michael Luttig is a Reagan-era Republican who was appointed an appellate judge by George H. W. Bush. He held that post until he retired in 2006. He is a widely respected conservative legal thinker who has sometimes been compared to Anton Scalia, for whom he once clerked. In short: not a left-winger.
Thursday, Luttig published an article in a liberal magazine, The New Republic: "The Final Battle for America's Democracy". In it, he outlined where he thinks the Trump regime has been headed ever since his failed coup on January 6, 2021: to reach an end state where democracy no longer matters, and the American people have lost their ability to check his power.
He assumes that the current polls hold, and that -- in spite of gerrymandering, in spite of voter suppression, in spite of whatever tricks Trump pulls with mail-in ballots -- Democrats win the November elections, at least far enough to take control of the House of Representatives.
But then we get to January 3, when the Congress comes back into session. Luttig pictures Speaker Mike Johnson doing something similar to what Trump tried in 2021: Using all Trump's rhetorical nonsense about Democratic cheating, illegal aliens voting, and so forth, Johnson will claim that some large number of the new Democratic representatives were elected improperly, and will refuse to seat them in the new Congress. In this way, Johnson avoids losing his power as Speaker and the GOP avoids losing control of the House.
Since the current Republican majority is so small, a mere handful of Republican congressmen could save democracy by (together with Democrats) refusing to go along with this. But will they?
If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.
Luttig has confidence in the current clerk of the House, but Johnson could replace him. Then "the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress."
The omitted Democrats can then go to federal court for a court order. But what if the clerk simply refuses to obey the court order? (See the Missouri situation above.)
Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis, helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Then we run into the Missouri situation again: Trump and Johnson can argue that the ensuing chaos (which they intentionally provoked) creates an emergency situation, allowing Trump to claim extra-legal emergency powers. Will the Supreme Court, this Supreme Court, stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law?
I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trumpv. UnitedStates. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.
But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.
And even if it does, what if Trump refuses to listen to them?
and thinking deeper about right-wing appeal in Germany and the US
That's the subject of the featured post, leaning heavily on an interview with history Thomas Zimmer and a column by Paul Krugman.
In Ireland on Sunday, during a taxpayer-funded trip to visit his own golf course, President Trump urged Ukraine to stop its most effective attacks:
Mr. Zelenskyy has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel because he’s causing a shortage of diesel. This isn’t done by the Middle East; this is done by what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.
Diesel in the US went over $6 a gallon Friday, a record high. This is bound to affect the price of anything shipped by truck, making life harder for Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Of course that's Trump's fault for starting his stupid war with Iran. But nothing is ever Trump's (or Putin's) fault, so he has to blame Ukraine.
Trump's FCC again censored Jimmy Kimmel, threatening ABC stations with losing their licenses if they aired Kimmel's interview with Texas senate candidate James Talerico.
The interview reinforces something I've felt about Talerico from the beginning: Republicans don't know what to do with a real Christian. They have so co-opted and distorted evangelical Christianity that they no longer recognize the actual teachings of Jesus.
So all they can do with Talerico is try to keep him off the air. This time, they succeeded in a way, but failed in the larger view.
and let's close with something restful
OK, it's been a tough week and I've made you look at a lot of disturbing things. You deserve a cute little lamb that never decides it's had enough petting.
