TOP DONOR TO HALEY STEVENS'S NEW BFF IS AN ANTI-SEMITE AND MUSLIM ELIMINATIONIST

A couple of days ago, when Congresswoman Haley Stevens of Michigan was escalating her fight with her party's Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, I wrote a post in which I made a leap from her attacks on El-Sayed to the unabashed Islam-bashing we're seeing from the Republican Party in Texas. I said:

You can say that [Stevens is] trying to prevent an electoral victory that will empower anti-Semites.... But what Stevens is doing puts her in league with people who literally want to make Islam illegal in America.

I cited a Texas Monthly story about Nate Schatzline, a top adviser to Governor Greg Abbott, who doesn't believe there's any such thing as non-radical Islam.

“The greatest threat to our Western society right now is the rise in Islam in the state of Texas,” Schatzline told the members of Texas First Conservative Alliance, a grassroots GOP group based in Lampasas County. “And by the way, I want you to notice something, because the governor agrees on this: I didn’t say ‘radical Islam.’ I said ‘Islam,’ because all Islam is radical.”

I also quoted Bo French, the GOP's candidate this year for a seat on the state's Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry: French says that Texas should "round up" every Muslim.

A commenter said I was irresponsible for connecting Stevens to these Texans:

Linking the behavior of Stevens these past few days to two weird Texans who want to deprive Muslims of their freedom of religion is a stretch, Steve.

But there is a link between the rise of Islam-bashing in Texas and the candidate Stevens has now officially endorsed in the Michigan Senate race, Republican Mike Rogers. One of the biggest donors to the Rogers campaign in Michigan is a rich Texas Islamophobe -- and anti-Semite -- who has been instrumental in pushing the Texas Republican Party in the direction of Muslim-bashing.

I'm talking about Tim Dunn. Along with fellow far-right oil billionaire Farris Wilks, Dunn has been pushing the Texas GOP farther and farther to the right in recent years. They were the major funders of Bo French's successful primary campaign this year.

A political action committee funded by Texas’ most prolific hardline conservative donors was the main benefactor to Bo French’s campaign for the Texas Railroad Commission in the March Republican primary, spending $375,000 to bolster his bid.

The Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice, formerly known as Defend Texas Liberty, gave French $225,000 and spent another $150,000 on an ad promoting his candidacy in a widely circulated conservative newsletter. The two PACs have been predominantly financed by West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have deployed tens of millions of dollars to pull the Texas GOP and Legislature toward their hardline, anti-LGBTQ+ and immigration stances.

Dunn and Wilks provided this support before French's notorious tweet lamenting the fact that people of South Asian descent were rooting for the Texas Longhorns, but they gave the money well after French posted an online poll asking, “Who is a bigger threat to America?”

Respondents had two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”

French's bigotry is constant -- and that appears to be just fine with Tim Dunn. Dunn and Wilks also bankrolled Nate Schatzline's successful run for the state legislature in 2022. Earlier this year, their True Texas Project funded a conference that

promises to educate attendees about the “threats of sharia law, totalitarianism and communism” that they say threaten their Christian faith....

Conference speakers include Texas Sen. Bob Hall of Rockwall, who compared Islam to Nazism at a state education hearing in June; State Rep. Andy Hopper of Wise County, who suggested banning Islam as a religion at a political event in March; [and] State Rep. Brent Money of Greenville, who formed an anti-sharia legislative caucus this year....

This year, Dunn reached beyond Texas to give millions of dollars to Mike Rogers in Michigan:

A Texas oil billionaire with deep ties to the Christian Nationalist movement and a rising presence in the national GOP scene, has contributed $5 million to a super PAC backing Republican Mike Rogers’ U.S. Senate campaign in Michigan, marking a foray into Midwest politics.

Tim Dunn’s contributions to the Great Lakes Conservative Fund, or GLCF, were made in two installments of $2.5 million each in April and June and accounted for more than 98% of the PAC’s total fundraising during the first half of 2025....

Dunn isn't just an Islamophobe -- he's a Christian nationalist who doesn't believe Jews should hold leadership positions in politics.

Former Republican Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who is Jewish, told the Texas Tribune that Dunn felt he was unqualified to hold that position, telling him in 2010 that “only Christians should hold leadership positions” in that state’s lower chamber.

Yesterday, on X, we heard from Ray Wert, a journalist who was a senior staffer to former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. Wert is married to Mallory McMorrow, who ran in this year's Michigan Democratic Senate primary along with Stevens and El-Sayed. Long before Stevens endorsed Mike Rogers, Wert -- who's Jewish -- encouraged Stevens to put her name on an op-ed denouncing the bigotry surrounding the Mike Rogers campaign. Wert says she refused.

The op-ed mentioned the large contribution from Tim Dunn and Dunn's belief that Jews shouldn't hold positions of power in politics. It also said this about Rogers:

Now let's look at the people working to elect him. On February 25, someone on X asked what should be done about Jews. A college student named Cameron Dundas replied: "Send them to North Korea?" Weeks later, Mike Rogers named him as his campus lead at a Michigan university.

He isn't the only one. Alexander Richmond, the Rogers for Senate campus lead at the University of Michigan, defended participants in the leaked Young Republicans group chat. You may remember that chat. "I love Hitler." Black Americans called "monkeys." Musings about sending political opponents to the gas chambers. Rape described as "epic."
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So what did Mike Rogers' campaign say when asked about all of it? "There are a lot of people across the state, with varying viewpoints."

... did Rogers cut ties with Richmond? Nope! In fact, there's pictures of the two of them tailgating at the Michigan football game two weeks ago.

... when people who hold the Jewish people in contempt attached themselves to his campaign and his money, Mike Rogers made a calculation. He kept the check. He kept the coalition. And he has never answered for it.

The post-Trump Republican Party is emerging. It will be very Islamophobic. It might not fully embrace anti-Semitism, but it will keep the door open open to unabashed anti-Semites. Haley Stevens has chosen the Republican in this race. That's what she's siding with. He took millions from a hatemonger.

And while we're on this subject, let's start asking elite media gatekeepers why they don't think the bigotry of billionaires like Dunn, Wilks, and Elon Musk warrants the wall-to-wall, day-after-day coverage that Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur received in this Michigan Senate race this year.

I'D LIKE A DEEP DIVE ON HOW HALEY STEVENS DECIDED TO SHIV ABDUL EL-SAYED (updated)

The most curious thing about Haley Stevens's decision to shiv Abdul El-Sayed in the last week of the Michigan Senate campaign has nothing to do with Muslims, Jews, or Israel. It's this:

[In September,] Stevens appeared on TMZ Live and [fiancé Jason] Turkish tagged along. Stevens was visibly excited during the segment, at one point turning to hosts Harvey Levin and Charles Latibeaudiere and saying,

“Isn’t he cute,” she shared.

“His name is Jason and he loves me to pieces,” she added.

Haley Stevens ran unsuccessfully for Senate this year, giving up her House seat in order to do so. She's 43 years old, and it's perfectly understandable that she's trying to set up a second act for herself. But she a local pol. She didn't have much of a national profile in September, when this appearance took place. Why was she being interviewed on TMZ Live, which is mostly an entertainment gossip show but also dabbles in politics?

I assume someone at TMZ wanted to help her do a soft launch of her post-congressional career. It's odd to me that the boyfriend was there -- he had no public profile at the time -- but there he was.

And there he was again this week, on multiple platforms, including TMZ again.

Turkish, who announced his engagement to Stevens less than three months ago, has spent the past several days loudly condemning El-Sayed on every platform available to him, while announcing that he plans to vote for Rogers due to El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel.

Turkish, a Democratic donor living in Michigan who has also given to GOP candidates, attended a campaign event for Rogers Wednesday night. While there, he called El-Sayed antisemitic. Then, as Stevens sat for an interview with the New York Times on Friday, Turkish went on TMZ and, on his fiancée’s behalf, said “I don’t think she’s going to be supporting Abdul El-Sayed very much longer.”

Stevens, however, has repeatedly insisted she is still supporting El-Sayed.

Thiks is from a Mother Jones story with the headline "Haley Stevens’ Fiancé Seems Dedicated to Ruining Her Career" -- but I strongly doubt that he's going rogue in defiance of Stevens's wishes.

After Abdul El-Sayed beat her in the primary, I think Stevens agreed to endorse him under intense pressure from the party, and she's been chafing ever since. I think she feels locked into the commitment she made to the party when she endorsed El-Sayed, and Turkish's endorsement of Rogers is her way of stabbing El-Sayed in the back without actually withdrawing her endorsement.

This has the earmarks of an operation cooked up in cooperation with the Republican Party and its media wing. You'll never guess where else Turkish appeared in recent days:

The fiancé of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) joined Fox News on Saturday to trash Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as antisemitic just days before the midterm elections.

Jason Turkish joined Griff Jenkins on Fox & Friends Weekend to discuss his headline-grabbing endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race....

Turkish ... described himself as a “lifelong Democrat” ...

There's the tell. This is a GOP op. There's very little that the Republican Party and the right-wing media love more than a person who can spew GOP talking points while saying, I'm a lifelong Democrat.

I don't think this is fake outrage on the part of Stevens and Turkish. But I think the specifics of the rollout are being coordinated with the GOP and the Rogers campaign. It seems obvious to me that Stevens has decided that her future is as a Democratic apostate. And I guess you can't blame her. There always a place in the right-wing media-sphere for anyone who decides to go this route.

*****

UPDATE: OMG.

Rep. Haley Stevens ... attended church services Sunday morning with Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers — a highly unusual move for a sitting Democrat in the waning days of a marquee race for a seat her party is fighting to hold.

Stevens and Rogers were seen separately entering Perfecting Church, a prominent Black church in the city.

Just admit it: You support Rogers. You voted for Rogers. You want El-Sayed to lose. Have the moral integrity to tell the truth.

*****

UPDATE: So she's officially endorsed Mike Rogers.

Haley Stevens says she is endorsing Mike Rogers for the U.S. Senate

[image or embed]

— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) November 1, 2026 at 12:35 PM

Note that she still describes herself as "a proud Democrat." So now we know: She clearly intends to continue bullshitting us that way, probably for years to come, while parroting GOP talking points. I bet she'll even call herself "a proud Democrat" in her inevitable 2028 Republican convention speech.

THE MULTI-FRONT WAR TO DELEGITIMIZE DEMOCRATS AND BLUNT A BLUE WAVE

It doesn't matter how big the Democratic wave is on Tuesday -- our political culture will never acknowledge that the party deserves power.

We're already being told that a Democratic win won't really be a Democratic win. Here's a Ruy Teixeira op-ed in The Washington Post. Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002 but has increasingly positioned himself as a Democrat-bashing Democrat.

Democrats are on course to have a stunningly good 2026 election....

But, paradoxically, the better they do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters. Those weaknesses led to Trump winning the 2024 election, but they are likely to fade from the party’s memory as Democrats, buoyed by the fool’s gold of midterms success, attempt to placate an energized left.

Celebration is easy; confronting underlying problems is hard. Thus, when Republicans get shellacked on Nov. 3, expect Democrats to see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party rather than a repudiation of the GOP — a far more plausible explanation.

But a Politico story suggests that Democrats, or at least Democratic politicians and operatives, won't see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party. They've already internalized the "Sure, they voted for us, but they still hate us" message.

More than a dozen lawmakers, campaign operatives, strategists and pollsters warned in interviews that national Democrats risk drawing the wrong conclusions if they take back control of at least one chamber of Congress next week.

Those figures from across the party worry that the midterms, which have become a referendum on President Donald Trump, have done little to improve the Democratic Party’s brand. They caution that a favorable political environment has papered over persistent problems for a party still grappling with why it lost the 2024 presidential election. And they admit they are still sharply divided over what its message should be heading into 2028.

“Don’t confuse them losing with us winning,” said Morgan Jackson, the senior adviser to Democrat Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign in North Carolina....

“This is not an affirmation of the Democratic Party in any which way,” said one veteran Democratic pollster working on Senate campaigns, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It is very much a rejection of Trump.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times, which sets the agenda for much of the media, is fixating on a fake outrage Republicans are promoting, while overlooking a breaking story that should be deeply damaging to President Trump. Jamison Foser writes:

... the national news media is doing everything they can to make the central story of the last days of this election season an alleged political maneuver by Alaska Democrats that was, by all accounts, legal, consistent with past behavior by both major political parties, and unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. America’s dominant news companies, led by the New York Times, have literally ignored [a] new rape allegation against the president of the United States while breathlessly hyping the Alaska maneuver, giving Donald Trump the distraction he desperately seeks and a phony premise for his anti-democratic efforts to effectively cancel a Senate election that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate....

At this writing, the New York Times has now run more than a dozen reports on this matter in just three days....

Meanwhile, the New York Times still has not told readers of a new rape allegation against Donald Trump that was made public on Monday in a report the New York Times dishonestly dismissed on grounds that “it largely cites allegations that have already been public.” The word “largely” is doing a awful lot of work in that sentence, given that the report includes a new rape allegation.

We know what the Times is doing, because the Times did this in 2016: It has concluded that the Democrats are likely to win this year, just as it concluded that Hillary Clinton was likely to win ten years ago, and has decided that the days just before Election Day are an excellent time to begin dragging the Democratic Party down, lest it get too uppity. I've said for decades here that the Times doesn't particularly like the far-right Republicans who rise to the top of the GOP, and often promotes Democrats who run against them or propose to clean up their messes, but it loathes Democrats once they've taken power -- and sometimes even when they're merely on the verge of accruing power. (The Times still yearns for a moderate Republican Party that hasn't existed in nearly half a century and will never exist again.)

And if all this isn't enough, we have the spectacle of Haley Stevens, an alleged Democrat who is clearly trying to defeat her party's Senate nominee in her home state because she's a ride-or-die Israel supporter and he's a Muslim and fierce Israel critic. Stevens, presumably under pressure, endorsed Abdul El-Sayed after he defeated her in the primary. But this week she began orchestrating a series of passive-aggressive attacks on El-Sayed, sitting by and insisting she still supports him even as her former campaign chair and her fiancé made headlines by expressing support for El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. The fiancé also showed up at a Rogers rally.

And then it got worse. Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell got Stevens and El-Sayed to agree on a unity rally, scheduled for tomorrow at a Black church in Detroit, along with South Carolina congressman James Clyburn. But Stevens then made two demands: that El-Sayed condemn an ad from an outside group associated with podcaster Cenk Ugyur that had been denounced as anti-Semitic (with some justification), and that El-Sayed take down an ad cheekily placed by his campaign on Fox News and Newsmax broadcasts -- an ad featuring words of praise from right-wing media figures, among them Tucker Carlson (who is an anti-Semite, but says nothing anti-Semitic in the ad).

El-Sayed has now asked Stevens not to appear at tomorrow's rally. I worry that she'll show up and bum-rush the lectern like Kanye bum-rushing Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards.

We can all envision the future of Haley Stevens. The carefully staged announcement that she's quit the Democratic Party. The book deal. The many, many appearances on Fox and CBS. The op-eds for The Free Press -- and, probably, The New York Times.

You can say that she's trying to prevent an electoral victory that will empower anti-Semites even if El-Sayed himself doesn't share their beliefs. But what Stevens is doing puts her in league with people who literally want to make Islam illegal in America.

Read some of what Texas Monthly has reported on Nate Schatzline, a top advisor to Governor Gregg Abbott on election security:

“The greatest threat to our Western society right now is the rise in Islam in the state of Texas,” Schatzline told the members of Texas First Conservative Alliance, a grassroots GOP group based in Lampasas County. “And by the way, I want you to notice something, because the governor agrees on this: I didn’t say ‘radical Islam.’ I said ‘Islam,’ because all Islam is radical.”

... Among his goals for the coming year: preventing mosques from serving as polling places; cracking down on what he claimed is a Muslim practice of casting votes on behalf of long-dead relatives; and working with Abbott and right-wing Texas House members to reclassify Islam as a political ideology—a move that the far right has long sought so that it can legally target Muslims without running afoul of religious-liberty protections.

Emphasis added. And by "religious-liberty protections," we mean "the Bill of Rights."

Schatzline isn't alone, of course:

Bo French, the nominee for a position on the Texas Railroad Commission, has argued that we must “round up” every Muslim.... And in June, at the Texas GOP’s convention, delegates openly celebrated the party’s lurch toward overt Islamophobia, pushing for Muslim Republicans to leave the party and branding Islam a “disease.”

This is the nationwide future of the Republican Party, a party Stevens will probably join soon. For now, she's trying to reduce her current party's power in the Senate, as are a lot of other nominally non-Republican figures, in many different ways.

DEMOCRATS MIGHT SHELLAC THE GOP, BUT WE'LL STILL BE IN "THE TRUMP ERA"

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos writes:

I keep seeing pundit musing about the end of the Trump era....

I think it’s highly likely that Democrats gain thirty or forty seats in the House next week, and win enough Senate races to control that chamber by four or five votes.

I think Democrats will make big gains in the House. I'm less sanguine about the Senate. Too many of the races Democrats are counting on are still well within the polling margin of error, at a time when there are signs that Democrats are much more willing to respond to pollsters than Republicans are. If I had to guess, I'd say that Democrats will fall short in at least some of the states where the polls say they're leading. My guess is Democrats will get to 51 or 52 seats, though I agree it's quite possible they'll do better.

But the question is: what then? Donald Trump and his base have no commitment to democracy because, among other reasons, they’re not democrats in even the loosest sense. Trump is a straight-up authoritarian, at the head of a mass anti-democratic political movement that at this point has most if not all of the hallmarks of contemporary neo-fascism.

Trump has already engaged in open flagrant sedition, in an attempt to overturn the results of a national election. He did this at a time when the upper reaches of his administration were not nearly as stacked with unhinged zealots and cultists as they are at present. That crime was also committed at a time when the Republican party was not nearly as all-in on supporting him no matter what he might do as it is now....

Why, given all this, do so many people seem so confident that Trump will in any sense whatsoever accept the results of an unambiguous electoral repudiation of his party and his movement? Because there will be nothing he can do about it? But that assumes a very great deal about how far Trump and his supporters throughout the federal government, the military, the courts, the governments of red states, the mobs in the street, etc. are or are not willing to go in the face of democratic repudiation.

I think we'll avoid the worst outcomes, for a couple of reasons.

First, Donald Trump is an authoritarian, but in one sense, he's not a "straight-up" authoritarian. A straight-up authoritarian would study the battlefield -- American democracy -- and identify and set in motion the most effective ways he could neutralize it. A straight-up authoritarian wouldn't spend hours every day on architectural projects, wouldn't be writing 1,318-word social media rants about a streaming-cable political comedian, wouldn't be entrusting his attempted election steal to government lawyers who struggle to obtain indictments. He'd figure out what works and do more of it.

How far are Trump and his supporters willing to go in the face of democratic repudiation? This seems like a scary answer, but on one level it isn't: they're willing to go far as Trump tells them to go. It's still much, much farther than they would be permitted to go if this were a well-functioning democracy, but they don't seem to be getting the go signal for a true authoritarian crackdown. Trump and Pete Hegseth don't appear to have mobilized the military. Mobs of MAGA thugs aren't launching unprovoked pre-election attacks on Democrats all over the country. Trump is appealing the many, many court rulings that have gone against him, but he isn't defying them.

I continue to believe that Trump isn't prepared to stop a Democratic wave election by any means necessary. What he is prepared to do is empower his administration to put together a dog's breakfast of anti-Democratic acts that don't add up to a comprehensive election-stealing plan but make him feel good.

So at a time when Democrats are likely to win a double-digit margin in the House, he's targeted precisely one specific House candidate, Ilhan Omar. She was elected in 2024 by a margin of nearly 50 points, and she'll probably win by an even bigger margin this year. Maybe he'll obtain an indictment against her. Maybe she'll be in a cell when the new Congress is sworn in. But Democrats are still likely to have a large House majority without her.

Trump's other gambit for saving the House seems to be the Justice Department's effort to block voting in California unless the state agrees not to count ballots from approximately 20,000 people the feds claim are illegally registered voters. Democrats are likely to win 47 of the state's 52 House races; if the Trump regime could take all those seats off the board altogether and convene a California-less House in January, Republicans would likely retain their majority. But the courts have rebuffed this effort so far, noting that there's no reason contested voters' ballots can't be challenged between Election Day and the scheduled election certification in December.

(Keep in mind that approximately 20,000 voters -- many of whom will undoubtedly prove to be citizens or non-voters -- spread out over 52 congressional districts average out to approximately 400 per district. It's likely that no House race in California will be decided by a margin that small.)

In the Senate, Republicans might have struck pay dirt with the story of Democratic operative in Alaska recruiting a candidate with the same name as the GOP incumbent. Alaska's Republican governor has ordered an investigation and says the state might not certify a win by Democrat Mary Peltola, even though there's no evidence that she was personally involved, and even though the state Supreme Court okayed the candidacy of the same-named candidate. This one could get tied up in court for months. But the feds' pursuit of Peltola is a strategy to try to win one seat. It's not an overall strategy to steal the Senate.

Yet I think Trump would be satisfied with this. Like millions of other Fox News grandpas, I think he's content -- in a way a true authoritarian wouldn't be -- with the opportunity to turn on the TV and see a lot of ragebait stories hinting that the evil Democrats are getting away with something. A true authoritarian would have a plan to prevent the opposition from winning; Trump seems content to have Attorney General Todd Blanche as his personal content creator. Alaska was rigged! An immigration fraudster won in Minneapolis! There was massive cheating in California! Trump seems as if he'd be satisfied believing that Republicans should have won.

It might get worse than that -- thugs at the polls, mobs in Washington. But it looks as if lawsuits rather than jackboots are Trump's go-to this year. The key person seems to be Blanche, not Pete Hegseth or Markwayne Mullin or Stephen Miller. That's Trump's lifelong happy place: employing lawyers to make trouble for his enemies in court. Unlike a true authoritarian, I don't think he cares if it works, as long as he's certain he's right, and as long as he keeps on fighting.

This is why we can't talk about "the Trump era" ending on Tuesday. We'll still have to endure this exhausting and extremely Trumpian post-election battle. Peltola and Omar might be targets long after the new Congress is sworn in. Trump will still command attention, even if it's in defeat. We'll probably save democracy from him for the most part, but we won't be able to get rid of him that easily.

THE BOMBING WILL RESUME ON ELECTION NIGHT, WON'T IT?

It sure looks as if Democrats will win the Senate as well as the House next week.

A new CNN poll in Michigan finds Abdul El-Sayed (D) leading Mike Rogers (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 42%....

The same poll in Texas finds James Talarico (D) leading Ken Paxton (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 43%....

The same poll in Maine finds Troy Jackson (D) leading Susan Collins (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 45%....

The same poll in Kansas finds Adam Hamilton (D) leading Roger Marshall (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 45%.

This is happening as the U.S. prepares to resume bombing in Iran. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.S. has told several Gulf Arab countries to be prepared for a short, intense military campaign after the U.S. midterm elections, people briefed on the conversations said....

The U.S. military is sending an additional Patriot system to Israel from Texas to beef up its missile defenses in the country, according to flight-tracking data and two officials with knowledge of the movement. The U.S. has also moved troops off bases in the Middle East where they were vulnerable in preparation for an escalation, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

U.S. forces in the region have been restocking their munitions, and bomber aircraft and jet fighters are preparing for strikes, some of the officials said. An additional aircraft-carrier strike group and Marine expeditionary unit are also poised to join an armada of roughly 20 other warships operating in the Middle East next month, although some ships could rotate out....

President Trump hasn’t decided to go ahead but is leaning toward a large postelection attack that could target Iranian infrastructure and nuclear sites, people familiar with his thinking said.

I think it's all but inevitable. And when will the attacks resume?

I expect them to start on Election Night.

Trump isn't a 24-hour news cycle guy. He grew up in a world of newspapers and Walter Cronkite. He thinks what's important for public perception on a given day is that day's headline story.

On the day after Election Day, he's planning to declare that positive results for Democrats are a sign that the election was rigged. He'll have Todd Blanche at the Justice Department pursuing legal harassmnent of winning Democrats. He'll have Mike Johnson hitting the fainting couch after a handful of DSA Democrats win. Johnson might echo Florida congressman Randy Fine's assertion that Ilhan Omar should be expelled from the House. If Mary Peltola and Abdul El-Sayed win, there'll be talk that they shouldn't be seated.

But Democratic wins could be so massive that the perception of a massive defeat for the GOP can't be avoided, even by people in the Republican information bubble. And even though I don't expect Trump to do a lot of deep reading next Wednesday, he won't be happy if the big, bold headline in the print The New York Times declares a Democratic rout. He won't be happy if the lede at CNN and even Fox is similar.

So I think he'll drop bombs Tuesday night, to ensure that the election isn't the only top headline on Wednesday. He might not do this if the blue wave is just a ripple. But if cable news anchors are reporting a resounding defeat for Trump, watch the bombs fall.

TRUMP IS USING THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT AS HIS PERSONAL SPA

Donald Trump hasn't been having particularly good luck in court in recent days. There's this, for instance:

A federal grand jury in D.C. rejected an attempt by the Justice Department to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for the account she gave lawmakers of President Donald Trump’s actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol....

In a brief court appearance Tuesday afternoon, Neville S. Hedley, who introduced himself as the acting senior litigation counsel at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui that the grand jury had not concurred on the proposed indictment. Hedley did not specify the defendant, but the people familiar said he was referring to Hutchinson.

And this:

A federal judge on Tuesday expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s effort to force California to set aside some 20,000 mail ballots that the federal government claimed were sent to noncitizens.

After listening to arguments for several hours in a packed Los Angeles courtroom, the judge, David O. Carter of U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ... suggested that he was unconvinced by the Justice Department’s argument that urgent action was necessary to halt illegal voting ahead of next week’s election. California counties have until Dec. 3 to certify elections, he noted, giving the government enough time to examine ballots and determine if any were cast illegally.

Also:

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a new charge against a pair of former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress, finding the Justice Department took novel — and improper — steps to announce the allegation.

Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said at a hearing that prosecutors created “their own category of charging” with the new complaint they tried to bring against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, who were initially charged last week with making false statements to Congress about their level of knowledge about an investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop....

Flores and Benavides have been targets of withering criticism from allies of President Donald Trump. Both were involved with election security issues around the 2020 contest, which Trump falsely claims was rigged. After they were arrested last week, Trump said, “I heard they were bad people.”

Trump loses in court on a regular basis. Yet his attorney general, Todd Blanche, just keeps throwing cases against the wall, especially as Election Day approaches.

In recent days Mr. Blanche and his team have announced, unsealed or initiated a succession of headline-grabbing actions certain to placate Mr. Trump’s demand for results, many targeting his longtime adversaries or promoting contested claims of election fraud....

On Monday, a federal judge in Washington unsealed new charges against James B. Comey, the third criminal case brought against the former F.B.I. director Mr. Trump openly reviles.

Also, we've had

intensification of an immigration investigation into Representative Ilhan Omar, a sharp critic of the White House; [and] the indictment of L. Louise Lucas, a Virginia state lawmaker, accused of overseeing a criminal conspiracy to sell marijuana....

All of this is why I disagree with something Jamelle Bouie says about Trump's feelings regarding the law:

Donald Trump is not the first president to break the law. He is not the first president to disregard the law. He is not even the first president to insist that his actions cannot, on some deep ontological level, be illegal. But he may be the first president to abandon the pretense that the law matters at all.

... He thinks he is a law unto himself; that he holds sovereign authority over the entire country; that he can rule by decree and punish those who resist. As one would expect, his administration has been an exercise in breaking the law, exceeding its bounds and violating its spirit.

This is true up to a point -- Trump think he's a law unto himself and can rule by decree -- but it's wrong to say that he think the law doesn't matter at all.

He knows that judges can rebuff him. He knows that they do this on a regular basis. Even the bootlickers on the Supreme Court rebuff him occasionally.

But while he'd prefer to win, just fighting these judges is lifefuel for him. He enjoys the combat, and he doesn't feel the least bit chastened or afflicted by self-doubt when he loses.

Trump is corrupt, and he believes everyone else is as corrupt as he is. When he loses in court, he tells himself -- and often tells the entire country -- that the courts are crooked and the system is rigged.

This belief is soothing to him, especially as he's approaching midterm elections his party is likely to lose badly. Believing that the courts are rigged (and that grand juries are corrupt as well) tells him that he's not really losing, or he wouldn't be losing if it weren't for the fact that the judges are enemies and crooks.

Notice that his underlings generally keep their jobs if they file weak cases that get thrown out of court, even if the filings are prepared hastily and riddled with typos.

A letter federal prosecutors sent on Monday to officials in Washington State seeking help in protecting “the integrity” of the midterms referred to “voter roles” — misspelling voter rolls. The Justice Department’s lawsuit in Alaska last week omitted the key verb describing the action it wanted the court to take.

It's fine with Trump even if an indictment isn't really an indictment.

The fact that Comey is charged in an information, and not an indictment, has legal significance. As a reminder, here’s the difference: An indictment is a criminal charge issued by a grand jury that hears the prosecutor’s evidence and makes a finding that there is probable cause to support the charges. An information is a document drafted by prosecutors and signed only by them....

The Fifth Amendment requires the government to go to a grand jury to charge a federal felony. Informations are used when a defendant has cut a plea deal with prosecutors and agreed to waive indictment. Comey did not. So this is a “waiverless information.” Prosecutors ... could not proceed with this case without taking it to the grand jury for indictment first.

Trump is using the Justice Department to file weak cases. When their weaknesses are exposed, Trump feels persecuted -- a feeling he deeply enjoys and treats as proof of his rightness. He could theoretically be shutting down courts that rebuff him -- as I assume some future, even more fascist Republican president will -- but he isn't. He's content with this. The fight alone is like a deep-tissue massage for him.

THE ELECTION-STEALING PROBLEM TRUMP HASN'T SOLVED: THE SPECTACLE OF ELECTION DAY

Surprising absolutely no one, the president and his allies have been arguing that the upcoming midterms are rigged. The Washington Post reports:

President Donald Trump and his allies have spent the final weeks before the midterms showering his supporters with a relentless stream of doubt about the legitimacy of the election, priming them to question results if Republicans lose.

In court, the administration is telegraphing its readiness to challenge results based on alleged fraud. In podcasts and social media posts that are delivered nonstop to Trump’s core backers, right-wing influencers are telling supporters to expect cheating.

... That messaging has, in particular, pushed overstated claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud — themes that are twice as prevalent as they were during the 2024 election cycle, The Post’s analysis found.

This has been going on for a decade -- as the Post notes, "Trump has questioned election results ever since 2016, when he won the presidency but lost the popular vote and alleged that more than 3 million people voted illegally." But all it's done, except among Trump's base, is convey the impression that Trump is a whiny little sore loser.

A survey this month by The Post, ABC News and Ipsos found just 28 percent of Americans are confident Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose.

A solid majority of Americans think the election will be fair and honest, according to multiple surveys. From the Post:

The New York Times says:

And from NPR:

Three-quarters of likely voters are confident that their state and local governments will run a fair and accurate election.

That includes solid majorities of Democrats (88%), Republicans (68%) and independents (75%), but Republicans were 20 points less likely than Democrats to think they would be run well. MAGA supporters were almost 30 points less likely.

Trump, his party, and his media allies have succeeded in making Republican voters much more paranoid about elections than Democrats, but even among Republicans, only a minority believe that elections are crooked and rigged.

Why have the would-be election stealers failed at thoroughly discrediting elections?

I think there's something about Election Day, and the election process in general, that they haven't found a way to discredit and don't quite understand. I know that there's no single "Election Day" anymore, but even across multiple days, the process has the feeling of a good old-fashioned civic ritual, with ordinary people -- people who could be your neighbors -- checking in voters, and ordinary people voting. It doesn't feel corrupt. It feels wholesome.

The vote counting is more of a media spectacle, but it taps into our inclination to enjoy contests -- sporting events, reality TV, entertainment awards. I've said this a few times over the years: the media rituals of vote counting seem straghtforward and focused on fine details. Harry Enten and Steve Kornacki will be on your TV talking about not just the current vote totals, but how many votes are outstanding in which precincts, suggesting a potential for certain outcomes that might or might not happen. It's similar to the way baseball announcers might discuss a pitcher's statistics as he's facing a batter with the potential winning run on second base. The impression conveyed is of a contest that's real and legitimate.

On Election Night, even Fox News covers the results this way, for the most part. This year, I assume CBS will do the same. The results are genuinely in doubt. Reporters and analysts don't talk as if the whole thing is fake and predetermined. We hear about waves of emotion at party headquarters. Some races are called quickly and others are in doubt for hours or days, and no one seemed to know in advance which ones would fall into which categories. It all feels real. And it feels real in part because we participated in it.

I don't think Republican disinformationists understands this. They certainly haven't figured out a way to counter it. I think that partly explains why they haven't even persuaded most of their own electorate that the whole thing is fake.