NOTHING TODAY

Busy day today. See you tomorrow.

REPUBLICANS ARE TRYING TO ROY COHN THE MIDTERMS

The Department of Justice is brazenly intervening in the Alaska Senate election, on the president's orders.

Donald Trump says he ordered the Department of Justice to sue the state of Alaska in an effort to block the results of a U.S. Senate election from being certified, unless the incumbent Republican wins.

Government attorneys filed a lawsuit Friday arguing that the presence of Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the ballot would confuse voters who support the sitting senator, Daniel S. Sullivan, in the unusual matchup of two candidates with the same name up against a Democratic candidate.

“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters Friday. “They have two Dan Sullivans.”

As The New York Times notes, this has already been litigated at the state level. (Keep in mind that the Constitution says that states run elections, though they're constrained by laws Congress passes. The Executive Branch has no role to play.)

Carol Beecher, the director of the state’s Division of Elections, initially rejected the other Mr. Sullivan’s application to run for the Senate seat, finding that he was not a good-faith candidate and was trying to confuse or mislead voters. But Mr. Sullivan sued, and a trial court held in June that he could be on the ballot. The Alaska Supreme Court affirmed that ruling.

The Trump administration appears to have no case.

“It is one of the weakest election lawsuits I’ve ever seen,” said Richard H. Pildes, a New York University law professor who specializes in election issues. “It should have no realistic chance of success in the courts.”

While the administration is doing this, it's also threatening election officials in California.

The Department of Justice sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California demanding that they help identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots.

The letter — sent to every county in the state, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles — also said local officials would “risk significant federal scrutiny” if they failed to comply with the Justice Department’s demands.

Some of what the Justice Department has sent to California counties is already demonstrably wrong:

In rural Inyo County, along the Nevada border, the registrar of voters said the list she was sent included just two people, and neither of them had been issued ballots. Danielle Sexton, the registrar, said her records showed they had never voted anywhere in California.

And in Mendocino County, a rugged stretch on the north coast, the registrar said the list she received was completely wrong.

“It’s not our voters that were listed,” said Katrina Bartolomie, the Mendocino clerk-recorder. “It’s from another county.”

Meanwhile, the administration's efforts to obtain unredacted voter rolls have been rebuffed in court in 27 out of 27 cases. The intimidation efforts in Alaska and California are likely to suffer a similar fate.

But apart from the Trumpers' apparent belief that they might as well try everything in case something works for them, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill, I see something else going on here.

This is an effort to create a vibe. I'm sure "vibe" is not the word the president would use, but it's a concept he's familiar with.

Trump learned how to manipulate public opinion from his early mentor, Roy Cohn. The mob lawyer's advice was simple: Never apologize. Never admit error. Never admit defeat. Always stay on offense.

Cohn wouldn't have used the word "vibe" either, but a major reason for this strategy is that if it works, it creates what we'd now call a vibe. The vibe is: We're fighting. We're the aggressors. And we're going to win.

I think that alone is intended to motivate the portion of past Republican base voters who up to this point seemed likely to sit out the midterms or vote Democratic. Up till now, the vibe has been: Democrats are winning. Democrats are winning in places where they shouldn't be winning. Trump is weak. The MAGA era is over. This White House aggression is meant to create a new narrative and a new vibe, even if none of the aggressive acts succeed.

They think their voters will turn out if they see their party fighting. I think that's also a major reason Vivek Ramaswamy is all in on that ad featuring a denunciation of his opponent, Amy Acton, by Acton's pedophile-enabling, fugitive-harboring mother: In Ramaswamy's view, it doesn't matter that the ad is morally repugnant and dishonest, nor does it matter that even some Republicans have denounced it. Ramaswamy may not care whether voters believe it -- he just wants them to believe that he fights.

This is what Trump's supporters have always said about him: he fights. Until the price of gas crossed $4 a gallon, it didn't seem to matter to them whether he fought wisely, or fought for the right things. He could fight people who have no impact on their lives -- Rosie O'Donnell, Kaitlan Collins -- and they'd cheer.

For weeks we've been talking about terrible Republican candidates (Ken Paxton, Roger Marshall), and Democrats who are clearly punching above their weight (James Talarico, Jon Ossoff). If we start talking about GOP aggression -- it's already happening in the Ohio governor's race -- the vibe might shift. And somewhere in hell, Roy Cohn will be smiling.

DON'T BLAME TRUMPISM FOR THE RAMASWAMY AD

I appreciate Michelle Goldberg's outraged response to the Vivek Ramaswamy ad featuring Amy Acton's pedophile-enabling mother.

It’s quite a feat, in this numb and debased era, to create a political advertisement so shocking and indecent that people from across the political spectrum feel the need to denounce it.

But her column describes the ad as Trumpist. It isn't. Its sheer depravity is Trumpian, but it could easily have been a GOP attack from the pre-Trump era.

Goldberg says that Ramaswamy has

opened a kind of proxy debate on the right about whether a post-Trump conservatism should try to reclaim some base-line morality or continue along its current smashmouth course.

But what was the "base-line morality" of the pre-Trump Republican Party? In 1988, the outgoing president, Ronald Reagan, suggested that Mike Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee, had undisclosed mental health issues. ("Look, I'm not going to pick on an invalid," Reagan said.) Dukakis was compelled to release years of medical records, and to deny that he had any such problems. This was shortly before a Republican senator alleged that there were photographs showing Dukakis's wife, Kitty, burning an American flag as a student. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the Republican nominee, George H.W. Bush, later said that his running mate, Dan Quayle, “damn sure never burned the American flag.”

In 1992, Bill Clinton was accused of spying for the Russians during a trip he took to Moscow in his twenties. He and his wife were subsequently accused of dozens of murders, and of running drugs out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas.

There weren't well-funded ad campaigns based on these falsehoods, but in 2004 there was a massive ad campaign dishonestly accusing John Kerry of earning his three Vietnam Purple Hearts under false pretenses. There was also a bestselling book and a viral moment when the extent of Kerry's wounds was mocked by Republican convention attendees wearing Purple Heart Band-Aids.

Donald Trump had nothing to do with any of this. This was the Party of Reagan. (I could also wind the clock back to the time of Richard Nixon.)

During the Barack Obama era, Trump might have tried to rush to the front of the birtherism parade, but he wasn't the first to allege that Obama's birth took place in Kenya rather than Hawaii. Trump wasn't primarily responsible for rumors that Obama is a socialist, a Muslim, a homosexual, a crack user, and a fake Columbia student. He's not the one who first said that Obama's bestselling memoir Dreams from My Father was actually written by Bill Ayers, a radical ex-felon, or that Obama's real father was a communist named Frank Marshall Davis. Trump spread many of those rumors, but none originated with him.

"Denouncing the Ramaswamy ad gives conservatives a chance to try to drag their movement out of the Trumpist gutter," Goldberg writes. But in all likelihood, no one who wants to win office as a Republican in the future will denounce it. Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has condemned it, but he's in his last year in office and is 79 years old. Goldberg cites criticism from National Review and Erick Erickson, but these are media figures, not politicians.

The ad won't be widely denounced by party members, because it's in keeping with what the GOP has been for many decades. This isn't a "Trumpist gutter." It's a Republican gutter.

IMPEACH MUSK?

David French has written a good column encouraging Democrats to pursue the impeachment of prominent figures in the Trump administration if they regain control of Congress. French reminds readers that officers other than presidents can be impeached:

The impeachment power is also broad. It extends to the president, vice president and all “civil officers” of the United States. While the term “civil officer” isn’t defined by the Constitution, it almost certainly extends to cabinet heads, ambassadors, other senior executive branch officials and federal judges.

And, as French reminds us,

it has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

Which brings me to Paul Krugman's latest Substack post, "It’s Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk."

Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some U.S. officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is quoted as saying that the administration was blind-sided: “There was no foreknowledge.”

... No private individual should, or indeed even have the capability to, make national security policy. Slowing down Starlink was, in effect, a U.S. intervention in a foreign conflict....

In modern warfare, where communication and real-time information are as important as rockets and artillery, Starlink is ... central to national security.... Decisions about which countries have full access to Starlink’s capacity are as much a matter of foreign policy and national security as decisions about which countries will be allowed to buy and operate U.S. high-tech weapons.

Such decisions cannot, must not, be left up to private individuals.

... Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy....

Krugman is right -- which is why, if we lived in a country that was functioning well under the U.S. Constitution, majority Democrats would impeach Musk next January, and a bipartisan supermajority would lock him out of government for life.

Is Musk eligible for impeachment? Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution says:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

French says that list certainly includes top government officials. But the plain text of this section says nothing about the prominence of the officials.

On September 30, Musk was named the co-leader of Project Meridian, a group advising the Defense Department on the future of warfare. His partners are Newt Gingrich and Palmer Luckey. This is a 120-day appointment, which means it will continue past the swearing-in of the new Congress.

Does that make Musk one of the "civil Officers of the United States"? Congress's Constitution Annotated page for this section says:

Aside from the President and Vice President, who are plainly identified in the Constitution’s text as impeachable officials, historical practice indicates that federal judges clearly qualify as officers subject to impeachment and removal, as the majority of proceedings have applied to those positions. Congress has also impeached the head of a cabinet-level Executive department. While this indicates a congressional understanding that high-level Executive officers may be subject to impeachment, it is unclear how far down the ranks of the federal bureaucracy this principle travels.

I suspect that if the parties were reversed and Republicans wanted to impeach a similar appointee chosen by a Democrat, they'd simply proceed.

Could Musk avoid impeachment by resigning from Project Meridian? Constitution Annotated says:

The second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump centered on the question of whether former officials remain subject to trial by the Senate after leaving office. There is historical evidence to support an original understanding that former officials remain subject to conviction and punishment by the Senate for actions taken while in office. The constitutional text, however, does not directly address the question.

The purpose of a Musk impeachment would be "disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States," as Article I, Section 3, Clause 7 puts it. Would the Framers have understood this as the termination of Musk's government contracts? Again, I suspect that if the parties were reversed, the GOP would simply proceed as if that were the case.

But this is a pipe dream. Democrats who are dependent on tech money wouldn't go along. The "liberal" media would be split on the constitutionality of the move (and would respond sympathetically to the howls of outrage from their tech and non-tech billionaire pals). Republicans would rally around Musk and say the impeachment was the real national security threat, not Musk's pro-Moscow behavior (or his open support for Eurofascism). And there'd be a serious risk that Musk himself would go nuclear -- not literally (I hope), but I'm sure he could threaten dire consequences for the entire country if challenged in this way.

Nevertheless, he should be removed from the government -- for his geopolitcal interventions, for the abuses of DOGE, for his child porn. I don't think that will happen even if Democrats win a trifecta in 2028. But a guy can dream.

*****

OH, AND: Here's a reminder that Americans don't like Musk:

WHY VIVEK RAMASWAMY DOESN'T CARE THAT AMY ACTON'S UNFIT MOTHER IS ATTACKING HER WITH LIES

This was a horrible story, and then it got worse.

First, we learned that someone close to the campaign of the struggling Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee, Vivek Ramaswamy, made an ad featuring the estranged mother of the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton. In the ad, Acton's mother, Donna Arthur, calls her a liar, insisting that the story Acton tells about her difficult upbringing and the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother's most recent husband is false. Early reports noted that the ad had been leaked and hadn't actually run, and it wasn't clear who made it and whether it was ever intended to be released.

Then a couple of things happened. The media -- including the conservative National Review -- confirmed that Amy Acton is telling the truth and her mother isn't:

Acton has long maintained — even before becoming a political candidate — that she grew up in an unstable home when she lived with her mother following her parents’ divorce, even spending a winter in a tent in a campground outside of Youngstown and enduring sexual abuse by one of her mother’s male partners. Court records confirm many key parts of Acton’s account of her life.

“She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life,” Acton’s mother says in the ad.

While Donna Arthur was married to Cledith Arthur in 1978 when Acton was 12 years old, Cledith Arthur was charged with having sexual contact with her, documents show. Evidence against him included a sworn statement from Acton’s biological father, and Acton herself was called to testify as a witness. Following his indictment by a grand jury, Cledith Arthur skipped town.

Donna Arthur also has her own criminal history, including pleading guilty to theft by deception while living in Pennsylvania in the 1990s and being accused of animal abuse as recently as 2021....

Following the ad’s release Acton, who is locked in a tight race with Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, put out a statement from her brother confirming the candidates’s side of the story.

“After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died,” Philip Stearns, the brother, said in a press release from the campaign.

The Washington Post reported:

... Acton’s campaign provided extensive documentation, from court records and contemporary reports in local media, that corroborated her account that she and her brother were removed from their mother’s home after her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and indicted in 1978 and charged with rape of “Amy Stearns being less than thirteen (13) years of age.”

The arrest came after Acton’s biological father, Gerald Stearns, made a report to police.

Then the Arthurs left Ohio.

Law enforcement lost track of Cledith Arthur after he moved, though there were multiple warrants issued to bring him in.

So it appears that Acton's mother also harbored a fugitive from justice.

Is this ad now too toxic to air? Oh, no, my friends. This is the Republican Party of Gingrich, Limbaugh, Ailes, Murdoch, Musk, and Trump. Ramaswamy isn't running away from the ad. He's owning it, and spreading it far and wide.

Late Tuesday, the campaign of Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy confirmed it produced a controversial commercial featuring the estranged birth mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton.

Despite drawing widespread condemnation from both parties for dragging Acton's traumatic upbringing into Ohio’s gubernatorial race, the campaign stated it intends to spend $4 million promoting the ad.

Why? Why run an ad that's been debunked and discredited, and that's based on the words of a horrible human being who was an enabler of child rape for years? Won't this infuriate and alienate many voters, in a state that already appears to be wary of Ramaswamy? (He trails Acton by nearly 4 points in the Real Clear Polling average, in a state Donald Trump won by double digits, despite multiple attacks on Acton's character that have been challenged by media fact-checkers.)

Ramaswamy doesn't care. He clearly believes that the main problem he needs to solve is motivating the hardcore Republican base to vote for him. He knows that a Republican can trot out any critic of a Democrat, however depraved or discredited, and the hardcore Republican base will believe that critic, and will treat any efforts to discredit that critic as lies and "fake news." He knows that hardcore Republican base voters live in an information bubble, a self-imposed North Korea of news where nothing that contradicts their prior beliefs is ever taken as a credible.

Oh, sure, it's the algorithms. But it's more than that. Republican voters outside the still-rabid base are slowly beginning to process the failings and shortcomings of the GOP officeholders they've supported in the past. Even the algorithms aren't preventing these people from rethinking their past loyalties. But the hardcore base believes only messaging that paints its heroes as pure good and Democrats as pure evil.

Ramaswamy thinks there are rabid GOP voters who still aren't sure about turning out for him. He wants them to vote. And he knows they'll believe anything that paints a Democrat as depraved and unfit, even if the rest of the state knows the assertions are a pack of lies. So of course he's all in on this ad. Next month, we'll know if he was right.

*****

Here's the ad, if you feel you need to see it and haven't watched it.

BOMBSHELL: Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s own mother urges voters not to vote for her daughter. “My name is Donna Arthur and I’m Amy Acton’s mother. I worked at Children and Family Service Association, building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America. I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent—and it’s not easy for a mother to say this—but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself. People can change, but first they have to tell the truth, and my daughter still isn’t doing that. Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor. If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself. It will only get worse.” That’s one hell of an October surprise.

— Walter Curt (@wcdispatch) October 20, 2026

THEY'RE LOOKING FOR DNA IN ILHAN OMAR'S GARBAGE AND GETTING TIPS FROM AN AGING WINGNUT BLOGGER

I sometimes turn to the Murdoch media, particularly the New York Post, when I want to know what Republicans are doing, or at least what they want us to believe they're doing. Right now, according to the Post, they want us to believe that they have Ilhan Omar dead to rights on a charge right-wingers have leveled for years: that she once married her brother as a form of immigration fraud.

People familiar with the years-long criminal probe said the feds have made use of whistleblowers, government records and now obtained DNA in an effort to substantiate decade-old allegations that Omar — and possibly members of her family like her father — defrauded immigration authorities.

One source said the DNA evidence was critical to proving an allegation that Omar married her brother when she wed Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 because she was trying to help him get a green card — which never came to fruition.

NewsNation suggests that some of the evidence against her was obtained by agents picking through her garbage.

Federal agents collected garbage in hopes of obtaining the DNA of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and her family before this week’s raid at the Minnesota Democrat’s home in Washington, D.C., sources tell NewsNation.

It appears that someone in the Trump regime recognizes that this is a bad look, because the Post story says:

Another source pushed back on initial reports that investigators had gone “dumpster diving” in order to get DNA swabs of Omar, Elmi, who is currently residing in the UK, or family members.

But a Breitbart story treats the NewsNation report as credible. Breitbart's headline is "Report: Feds Collected Garbage from Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Home, Searching for Her DNA." That Breitbart story cites another NewsNation story, from which we learn that the feds are garnering tips from an aging right-wing blogger:

Scott Johnson, a retired Minnesota attorney and co-founder of Powerline Blog, first began looking into Omar in 2016, when she first ran for local office.

Johnson tells NewsNation he received an unexpected call earlier this year to meet with two federal agents in Minnesota, eight months before the October raid on Omar’s Washington, D.C. home.

“In January of this year, I was contacted by two ICE agents who asked me to meet with them, and this was in the middle of Operation Metro Surge,” Johnson said.

“They asked me questions that related to issues of (Omar’s) immigration and naturalization and also questions related to her father, which would bear on the same issue,” he said. “So I inferred at the end of that hour, and from other help that they asked me for, that they were looking at a possible civil proceeding that might lead to her denaturalization.”

... Johnson said they asked him for documents and files related to Omar and came back to meet with him a second time to discuss some of his early sources in Minnesota’s Somali community.

Johnson, incidentally, has close ties to the Federalist Society.

*****

This is where the Republican Party is headed, as Donald Trump circles the drain and Democrats seem poised for big wins in the midterms.

Last summer, I wrote a post titled "The Next Trump Might Just Be a Collection of Grievances." In it, I argued that the GOP won't necessarily need a charismatic leader to get through the post-Trump period -- it might just rally the faithful around grievances, the way it did after the self-immolation of the George W. Bush presidency, when the GOP underwent a Tea Party rebranding. In a follow-up post, I argued that anti-Muslim (and anti-trans) hate might be the glue that keeps the GOP together when Trump no longer can.

I've been thinking that the Justice Department is fixating on Omar because Donald Trump has a particular hatred of Black women, Africans, Muslims who aren't Trump family business partners, women who aren't deferential, and progressives -- all boxes checked by Omar. But the lawfare war on Omar also points to a GOP future.

After the election, Republican message generators want the Democrats' efforts to battle Trump in Congress to compete in the headlines with a long legal fight against Omar. They want her in the news every day, wearing her hijab, angrily denying the charges against her.

I don't think this will be of much interest to anyone outside the base, but it will keep the base loyal. Republicans will settle for that and hope that they get a few lucky breaks that will make their message more "salient," as the consultants say, to voters outside the base.

What are they hoping for? Maybe a terrorist attack on America -- or maybe some unrest like what's taking place in France and other European countries right now.

Here's a scare headline at FoxNews.com right now:

Global 'Chaos Inc' grows to 101 groups with plans for new rounds of demonstrations

Fox News Digital investigation identifies 101 organizations in 'red-green' protest ecosystem stretching across 9 countries

From the story:

Two days after an estimated 500,000 demonstrators poured into streets across France and clashes left parts of Paris and other cities burning, French activists are calling supporters back into the streets Saturday, Oct. 24, for a new protest billed as "Acte II," with 212 "mobilizations" currently planned, according to a digital map of the plans.

And a growing number of communist, socialist and hard-leftist organizations are answering another call for a coordinated European youth strike on Friday, Nov. 20.

A Fox News Digital investigation has now identified 101 organizations across 9 countries – including the U.S. – that are coordinating, organizing or amplifying protests in Europe in an expanding protest ecosystem, up from 54 organizations identified on Monday.

(Emphasis added.)

... They represent a nexus of the "red-green" alliance, merging Islamist organizations that are symbolized by the color green, and far-left, communist and socialist groups represented by the color red.

At Thanksgiving, you can expect your right-wing uncle to rattle off the phrase "red-green alliance" as if he's a lifelong expert in geopolitics.

Oh, and:

The network also include groups that proudly use the "Antifa" moniker, like "Action AntiFa16," an organization that describes itself in the Angoulême, France, Acte II announcement.

CHECKMATE, LIBS!

To the extent that there's an alliance in Europe between leftists and Muslims, it's with Muslims who support Palestinian rights, as well as the economic and social goals of the non-Muslim demonstrators. It's not because they want to "Islamicize" Europe and force everyone into burqas, with the eager assent of white lefties. But that's what your right-wing uncle believes.

"islamo-communism" is basically a latter-day gloss on "judeo-bolshevism" for the modern conservative, and it has about as little connection with reality

— Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com) October 18, 2026 at 11:29 AM

As I noted yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance is fanning these racist flames.

It won't surprise me at all if at least some Americans protest in solidarity with the French. Some of these actions might lead to violence or property damage. I'm sure the GOP fervently hopes that happens, and happens before Election Day, although I think the cake is already baked and the election will turn on high prices and Trump's indifference to ordinary Americans. A few dumpster fires in Portland won't change the electoral outcome.

But one of the prime directives of the GOP is "Always Be Messaging." This will be a prominent part of their messaging in the near future, until they can rally around a new leader, just the way rallying around "critical race theory" and the trans panic sustained them in the period after January 6 and Joe Biden's inauguration. Did it work? It won them the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election.

Omar is someone they hate. She's also a living embodiment of their largely imaginary red-green alliance. They can say she wants to impose communism and Sharia law, even though she doesn't want either of those things. I don't think this is enough to keep the party thriving in the immediate post-November period or in the next couple of years, but it will help keep a third of the country loyal to the GOP.

ON THE FRENCH PROTESTS, TRUMP, VANCE, PUTIN, AND THEIR FAR-RIGHT EURO ALLIES SPEAK WITH ONE RACIST VOICE

My response to this tweet probably isn't the same as yours.

The most common response is mockery of Vance for ignoring French history, in previous centuries and recently. A few examples from Bluesky:

Chuckling at the notion that unassimilated third-worlders inported the practice of rioting and burning shit down TO FRANCE

****

France riots and the historical illiterates Trump and Vance immediately blame "third world" immigrants. Because, um, the French themselves have no history of violent urban unrest... Yellow Vest protests, 1968, 1871 Paris Commune, 1830 revolts, 1792 great terror, 1789 revolution, etc etc.

****

“The French never rioted or burned things down before!”

(I mean, if anything, this shows that immigrants have assimilated to French history and culture).

But I'm more alarmed at Vance's language. It's not a dog whistle -- it's undiluted "scientific" racism. We expect this from President Trump, who posted this on Truth Social yesterday:



Trump followed up this morning with this:



Vance avoids all caps and exclamation points. His tone is measured and emotionless. I worry that our political culture won't recognize that he's as bigoted as Trump -- possibly more so -- and might divide America even more than Trump has if he has a shot at winning the president.

You might he can't possibly win in 2028. Even if he can't, it's easy to imagine a backlash against a victorious Democrat by 2032, when Vance will be only in his late forties. (If you're sure that American voters will still remember the horrors of the second Trump presidency four years later, you're forgetting their amnesia after the first Trump presidency.)

I worry about Vance because I watched quite a bit of the CBS News town hall Vance did over the weekend.



Was it impressive? No. Did Vance demonstrate charisma? No -- but I've lived through seventeen presidential elections (I was born in 1959) and five of them were won by very uncharismatic Republicans (Richard Nixon twice, the Bushes three times). You don't necessarily need charisma if you can successfully sell yourself to white heartlanders as a bulwark against dangerous leftists, liberals, and non-whites.

Vance wasn't charismatic, but he was soft-spoken, and his tone carried an undercurrent of "I feel your pain" and a willingness to admit at least some error that's absent from Trump's bloviations. Watch the first four minutes in the clip above, and try to ignore the fact that it's unconscionable that the administration mismanaged the Iran war in a way that led to the death of the questioner's servicemember wife. Watch Vance perform empathy:

So Joey, first of all, look, I owe and the whole country owes your family a debt of gratitude that is quite literally impossible to repay. I won't pretend that anything that I say is going to make it better or easier, but I hope it helps a little bit to know that your wife was a precious human being who served her country honorably, and I'm never going to forget about her.

He's better at this than you think. America might fall for it -- especially America's political culture, which clearly dislikes some of the leading 2028 Democrats.

That's why Vance's bigotry is so disturbing -- America's opinion-shapers might treat him as a reasonable man, even though he's an obvious hater. On the subject of the unrest in France, he and Trump sound exactly like Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia, and like quite a few European far-rightists. Le Monde notes the similarities in a story headlined "Trump and Putin Claim French Protests Are Evidence of 'Migrant Chaos' and 'Europe's Decline'" (the story is free to read here):

Rarely have reactions from Washington and Moscow so closely aligned, both in substance and in tone. The US president feigned alarm on his Truth Social platform on Sunday: "France is burning!" Ignoring the demands raised by high school and university students for more resources for education, and showing disregard for the distress of the middle class, whose cost of living has been partly raised by the war in Iran that he himself launched, Trump analyzed the anger of the French as coming solely from "people from an entirely different world," he wrote....

"Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn't listen," Vice President JD Vance had already pontificated the day before on X.... Laura Loomer, an influencer from the Make America Great Again sphere, openly embraced racist rhetoric: "The most destructive species on planet earth is the African Muslim. Don't believe me, just look at Paris," she posted on X on Sunday.

... on X, Kirill Dmitriev, [Putin's] special representative for relations with the US, appeared to echo Washington's words, seeing in France "Western civilization's suicide through migrant chaos."

... "The West has fallen because of an inability to discuss and correct consequential mistakes on migration, energy, and warmongering," wrote Dmitriev on X.

On Sunday, several representatives of the European far right openly adopted the rhetoric of the Trump administration and the Kremlin. "If we don't wake up, the carnage in France is our future. We need to return to law, order, and borders," declared Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, on X....

In Germany, Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), was quoted Sunday by the daily Rheinische Post as seeing the clashes in Paris as an "attack on Western civilization by migrant mobs and far-left agitators," arguing that "open borders and mass immigration" were responsible for the violence. "This is what awaits Europe with Islamo-leftism. Barbarians ravaging all that remains of beauty and civilization," said Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's far-right Vox party, on X. "The axis of evil that unites left-wing extremists and Islamic fanatics is the number one danger to confront and defeat," wrote Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-migrant League and Italy's deputy prime minister, on the same platform, sharing footage of Limoges city hall in flames.

These are clearly the allies of the front-runner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. If there's France-syle unrest in America, if there are terrorist attacks or an increase in crime, or if the media simply takes against the next Democratic nominee, Vance has a shot at the presidency. He also will become president if Trump dies in office. People who hate bigotry -- a group that ought to include everyone, and realistically ought to include all non-Republicans, including those in the media -- should be more alarmed about these possibilities than they are.

JUST ANOTHER RIGHT-WING PROVOCATEUR WHO'S HIGH ON HIS OWN PROPAGANDA SUPPLY (updated)

This clip from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall is getting a lot of attention:

This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his.

[image or embed]

— Abdul El-Sayed (@abdulelsayed.bsky.social) October 17, 2026 at 9:17 PM

Here's a quick summary of the clip:

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed clashed with a voter who asked him to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, prompting an extended exchange in which the progressive contender accused the man of questioning his loyalty to the U.S. because of his religion....

The voter, who identified himself as Tommy, asked El-Sayed whether he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed responded, "Sure. Yeah, absolutely," before questioning why the man believed he needed to be asked....

"You assume, Tommy, that because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution," El-Sayed said. "That's your assumption. That's implicit in the question."

El-Sayed went on to compare the scrutiny to questions John F. Kennedy faced over his Catholic faith during his 1960 presidential campaign. He said the Constitution would guide him as a senator and protect the right of Americans to practice a religion or no religion.

"For me, that Constitution is the guiding light," El-Sayed said. He then turned the discussion toward the voter's Christian faith and religious freedom, ultimately asking whether the man disavowed attempts to introduce religious doctrine into U.S. law. The voter said he did not.

"So I think it's you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me," El-Sayed replied.

This exchange took place in Caro, Michigan, the county seat of Tuscola County, which voted for Donald Trump in 2024 by a 71%-28% margin. So this wasn't friendly territory for any Democrat. But Tommy, the questioner, isn't just an ordinary conservative. As Marisa Kabas reports at The Handbasket, Tommy is the son of Timmy Teepell, a veteran Republican operative. Tommy, for his part,

served as Operations Director for Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley until February of this year, according to Legistorm. He then took a job as Political Director for the failed gubernatorial campaign of Philip Sarnecki, a Republican businessman in Kansas.

Kabas writes:

What brought the younger Teepell to the small town of Caro and his viral moment with El-Sayed? An October 2nd story in the University of Michigan student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, revealed that a conservative PAC called America Next offered College Republicans $200 to travel to an upcoming El-Sayed town hall in Flint to “boo” him and ask him inflammatory questions—hoping to spark embarrassing viral moments for the candidate.

So Tommy was a paid provocateur. And what was the point of this particular question? One commenter at Bluesky offers this theory:

Clearly the purpose was to get sayed mad so they could scream ‘angry Muslim!!!!’ because Muslims don’t get to be angry.

Unlike MAGA politicians, who are allowed to be in a state of incandescent, screaming public rage at any time.

That's part of it, I think. But I think the main reason for the question -- "Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?" -- is that Tommy thought El-Sayed would express support, or at least equivocate in response to the question, even though El-Sayed has repeatedly responded to questions about the group by denying any support. It never occurred to Tommy that El-Sayed might respond to a call for disavowal by saying, "Sure. Yeah, absolutely."

Tommy lives in a right-wing information bubble. What he learns about Muslims in that bubble is that they all hate America, all support anti-American and anti-Western terrorist groups, and all want to impose Taliban-like religious strictures on Americans by insinuating themselves into the government and outbreeding white Christians.

This is what right-wing propagandists cynically tell the rubes in order to get the rubes to vote Republican, but now many of the party's operatives are the rubes. They believe the dishonest propaganda. They're not just dealing the drugs -- they're high on their own supply.

It's true that El-Sayed's half-sister claims their family supports the Muslim Brotherhood, but this specifically focuses on El-Sayed's mother, who wasn't a part of his life for most of his childhood.

In an interview that aired Thursday, NBC’s Tom Llamas asked El-Sayed about past tweets from his half sister, including one in which she mentions their biological mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”

El-Sayed’s Egyptian immigrant parents divorced when he was 3 years old, and his biological mother, Fatten Elkomy, moved out of Michigan. El-Sayed was raised by his father, Mohamed, and stepmother, Jacqueline Johnson, in a Detroit suburb.

“I was born in 1984, down the street in Rochester Hills. I was raised here in Michigan, went to the University of Michigan, rebuilt the health department in this city, led the health department in this county, and you want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?” El-Sayed told Llamas in the interview.

After Llamas pressed him, El-Sayed insisted that he has no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood....

“I have no ties. We have no ties,” El-Sayed told Llamas. “I have never had these conversations with my mother. I wasn’t raised by my mother ... You’re using hearsay evidence from a tweet. It’s just not serious.”

So in Caro, El-Sayed disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood -- as he previously did in interviews with NBC's Tom Llamas and Kristen Welker -- and the best they've got is that his disavowal wasn't loud enough. Here's Jan Crawford, whose right-wing leanings at CBS News (and ABC before that) were obvious decades before Bari Weiss became her boss:

If you believe that El-Sayed's eloquent invocation of John F. Kennedy and the Constitution was a "self own," you live in a right-wing bubble, Jan. And if you didn't hear his disavowal the first time, get your hearing checked -- or your biases.

*****

UPDATE: Crawford's tweet has now been deleted, though not because she regrets it.

Earlier, I tweeted a video from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall. I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize.

— Jan Crawford (@JanCBS) October 18, 2026

A SOCIAL MEDIA MOB IS STILL COMING FOR CORNELL'S JANE DOE

My first problem with the New York Times story about online efforts to doxx Jane Doe involves verb tenses. Here's the headline:

When a Social Media Mob Came for Cornell’s Jane Doe

After a former student named seven men in a lawsuit saying they had sexually assaulted her, a movement gained steam online to reveal her identity.

The verbs here are in the past tense. Reading this, you might imagine that the campaign to doxx Jane Doe was a toxic online moment, but it's over now. It wasn't, and it isn't.

The Times story makes clear that the first key figure in this doxxing campaign was a real dirtbag, but it suggests that his efforts belong to the recent past.

The online campaign to unmask Jane Doe began with pleas on X.

“Please help me discover the Cornell girl,” Aidan Thompson, a 23-year-old man who regularly praises Hitler and disparages women on the social media platform, wrote in one of the first posts. “I have a good lead, but I need your help.”

Within hours of Mr. Thompson’s post, another user had offered a bounty of $5,000 for the name and photos of the woman who had sued Cornell University under the pseudonym, claiming she had been gang raped at a fraternity party. Within a day, commenters were circulating a woman’s name and images of her from a social media account....

A little more than a week after Mr. Thompson’s post about the former Cornell student, more than 11,000 accounts had made almost 25,000 posts that purported to name her, according to an analysis by an online analytics company, Gudea, conducted at the request of The New York Times.

Aidan Thompson's tweet (which I won't link) was posted on September 29 -- two and a half weeks ago. I don't know why the Times reporters -- five of them share a byline -- didn't get a more up-to-date analysis of the doxxing traffic. Again, note the verb tense: "more than 11,000 accounts had made almost 25,000 posts that purported to name her." It's easy to read this as a rapid online flare-up that's already burned itself out. That's not the case. I know the name that's circulating. I count 46 new tweets using the name in reference to the Cornell rape since midnight Eastern time.

The Times reporters tell us:

On the fringes of the internet, bigots, attention-seekers and trolls have long seized on polarizing legal cases to air anger and disgust at women — and boost their following.

Now they were coming for Jane Doe.

Why use the phrase "On the fringes of the internet" when this particular doxxing campaign began, and largely spread, on the massive social media platform owned by the world's richest man? (One of today's 46 tweets using the unearthed name is from a prominent right-wing commentator who has written for the Times, Richard Hanania.)

Thompson reveals a name, and we get the tiniest suggestion that this is an ongoing problem:

Fifteen hours after sending the call out for Jane Doe’s identity, he shared a woman’s name and photos, calling it “BREAKING NEWS.”

“They have a right to face their accuser,” he wrote of the seven men, “and we have a right to publish her identity if we discover it.”

This time, his post ricocheted across X, shared by users and amplified by the platform’s own recommendation algorithm. It has since accumulated more than 19 million views.

The phrase "It has since accumulated" quietly makes clear that the post is still up, and is still getting views. If I were editing this story, I'd want to make that explicit. I'd also want to make clear that posts purporting to identify Jane Doe are all over X right now.

I'd especially want to do this because the story directs our attention to several online takedowns, like this one:

One series of posts on X included not only a name, but also an address, phone numbers and information about the woman’s apparent relatives. The posts, which violated X’s rules on sharing private information, racked up more than 1.4 million views, before being removed a few days later.

And this one:

Savanah Hernandez, a commentator for Turning Point USA, who has more than 700,000 followers on X, shared a woman’s name and photo and wrote that the accuser “was so embarrassed about everyone at Cornell knowing she was such a huge HOE.”

She deleted the post not long after....

Hernandez didn't just share "a woman's name" -- she shared the name everyone else in this doxxing campaign shared. (I found the text of her deleted tweet at a gun forum.)

And we're told that the most well-known doxxer took his post down as well:

Soon after Mr. Thompson claimed to have unmasked Jane Doe, Michael Tracey, an independent journalist with more than 350,000 followers on X, was preparing a post of his own.

Mr. Tracey, who had earlier gained notoriety for questioning the veracity of a prominent Jeffrey Epstein accuser, had recently fixated on people who file anonymous legal complaints making what he called “reputation-destroying claims” about others.

By Oct. 2, Mr. Tracey announced to his followers on X that he, too, had confirmed Jane Doe’s identity.

His post on X listed the name and photo of the woman Mr. Thompson had identified.

Separately, on Substack, Mr. Tracey posted a screenshot he said had come from a state court website that also listed the name in relation to the Jane Doe case....

But it appeared Mr. Tracey had been duped.

The site he referred to had no connection to the New York State court system. Instead, registration records show, it appeared to have been created by a 33-year-old man in Michigan who described himself on social media as a “digital creator.” That man did not respond to requests for comment, and the site is now offline.

Amid cascading criticism, Mr. Tracey deleted the posts with the woman’s name later on Oct. 2, arguing that “the principle has been served.”

And beyond that, we're told:

On Instagram, the same name was soon automatically labeled a “popular” search subject.

A spokeswoman for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said such posts were prohibited by company policy and that the social network had removed some of the material. The company also removed the name from the ranked results on the platform’s search function.

YouTube, too, took down videos that claimed to identify the woman, saying they violated its harassment policies, a spokesman said.

I think it would be easy to read all this and imagine that the virus has been largely quarantined. It hasn't. The name and images said to be Jane Doe are still all over X. Meta may say that posts doxxing Jane Doe are "prohibited by company policy," but a quick Google search for the widely circulated name and "threads" will lead you to many posts on Meta's Threads that include the widely circulated name and images.

The story ends with a report of a swatting incident against Jane Doe and her family, along with a reference to an additional swatting attempt. But this is prefaced with a weird sentence:

As the online furor mounted, it appeared that at least some people on the internet had indeed learned Jane Doe’s true identity.

It's as if we're being told that the widespread dissemination of Jane Doe's purported name and image might have had nothing to do with the swatting. Hey, wasn't Michael Tracey "duped"? Maybe the name and identifying information he (and 11,000 other people) posted was false, and the swatting happened through some other means!

But that would be an equally horrifying story -- an 11,000-strong mob identifying (and slut-shaming) a person who had nothing to do with the incident. Do the five authors of this story believe that's possible? If so, there's the story: a person has been exposed who either is Jane Doe, which is appalling, or isn't, which is appalling in a different way.

The mob settled on one person. That person's privacy is being violated anew every single day, even now. This isn't over, and that's what the story should have made clear.

THE WHITE HOUSE CARES ABOUT ELECTION-FRAUD VIBES, NOT ELECTION FRAUD

Even if you believe that there's massive, persistent, election-altering Democratic voter fraud, what the Trump administration is doing in California makes no sense:

The Trump administration on Thursday sued the state of California and a Los Angeles County official, seeking to temporarily block the state from counting mail ballots submitted by voters it suspects are noncitizens.

The suit ... would apply to some 20,000 people in the state the administration has cast as “likely noncitizens” ...

The administration has escalated its fight with California over the last week.

Days earlier, federal authorities sent a thumb drive of roughly 20,000 names they suspected were noncitizens registered to vote in California to election officials in Los Angeles County, demanding they act within 48 hours.

Data security is the Trump administration's passion:

The LA County Clerk separately said in a statement they would refuse to access contents of the thumb drive -- which was delivered to the office with a password attached on a sticky note -- "because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols."

"We do not consider the device a secure medium," LA County Clerk Dean Logan said in the statement.

(Emphasis added.)

This figure of 20,000 is quite a comedown from the administration's previous claims:

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at [a] press conference Thursday morning that ... the administration's alleged number of noncitizens on the state's voter rolls had dropped from the 190,000 flagged over the summer by the Department of Homeland Security to the 20,000 noted by the Justice Department.

"What happened to those 170,000? They just got those wrong," Bonta said.

And the administration is probably wrong about all or nearly all of the 20,000:

Similar past claims of thousands of illegal voters have fallen apart under scrutiny. Last month, election officials in Nevada said that they had examined a list provided by homeland security officials of 185 names of supposed noncitizens who had been improperly registered to vote, and found that every person on the list was a lawful citizen.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the administration is right. Let's assume that 20,000 voters are on the rolls in California who shouldn't be. And let's assume, as Republicans always do, that these real or imaginary illegal voters will all vote, and will all vote Democratic.

Would that even tip the midterms in the GOP's favor? Nope. California does have 52 seats in the House of Representatives, most of which will be Democratic. But it has few genuinely contested seats. Contested seats are all over the country, but not really in California.

The administration says California is letting 20,000 non-citizens vote in California. Do you know how many Californians cast House votes in the last midterms, in 2022? More than 10 million. Twenty thousand is 0.2% of 10 million. Very few elections are won by 0.2% or less.

The administration sent that thumb drive with the password attached on a sticky note to Los Angeles County. Let's assume that all of those 20,000 real or imaginary non-citizen voters are in L.A. County -- a massive county with a population of more than 9 million. How likely is it that these allegedly illegal votes will tip a House race?

Not very. There are 18 congressional districts that are wholly or partly in L.A. County -- districts 23, 26 through 32, 34 through 38, and 41 through 45. Every one of these is ranked as "solid D" by the Cook Political Report, with the exception of CA-23 ("solid R") and CA-45 ("likely D"). Not one of these is a swing district -- in fact, California has only three swing districts, all outside L.A. County.

So in a year when Democrats are likely to win the House by far more than three seats, it's next to impossible that 20,000 votes, distributed across a massive county or a massive state (it's not clear which), would decide the House, even in the unlikely event that the administration is right about the eligibility of those voters. (Beyond that, the state has no Senate race this year, the marquee mayor's race in Los Angeles is between two Democrats, and polls show that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate is leading the Republican candidate by more than 20 points.)

But this isn't about preventing voter fraud. It's about giving Fox News addicts -- including President Trump -- a vibes-based reason to believe there's fraud. The Trumpers wanted to give California and L.A. County an absurdly brief period to deal with this, 48 hours, in the hope that there'd be no response and they could say, "See? A cover-up!" They're suing even though, as The New York Times notes, "Over the past 18 months, the Trump administration has sued California and other states over voter rolls, and has lost resoundingly in court." The late filing suggests that they actually hope to be rebuffed -- again, so they can say the system is rigged against them.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former DOJ voting rights attorney ... said that timing made it appear DOJ was “almost seeming to try to set California up,” particularly because federal law restricts systematic voter-list maintenance during the 90 days immediately preceding a federal election.

Think about this. The government is supposed to do things for the public. You might not always like the way the government goes about this -- for instance, the Trump administration is fighting a war, imposing tariffs, and pursuing a heavy-handed and frequently brutal immigration crackdown in ways that are broadly unpopular -- but at least these are policy pursuits.

What the administration is doing in California isn't an attempt to crack down on (real or imagined) electoral fraud. It's an attempt to generate content for the right-wing media. It's designed to make right-leaning voters angry enough to vote Republican. It's also designed to please the president, who, when he thinks voter fraud, thinks Hispanic immigrants and Democratic states, and thus California.

The administration is making unlawful demands on California for the same reason it's targeting Ilhan Omar rather than, say, immigrant drug gangs -- because California and Omar make Fox viewers, and specifically the president, extremely angry. It's not governance -- it's taxpayer-funded ragebait.

NO, TRUMP WON'T BURN IT ALL DOWN (BUT WHAT HE'LL DO WON'T BE MUCH BETTER)

Paul Krugman looks at the downfall of Adolf Hitler and wonders whether it's a portent of Donald Trump's future:

By the middle of March 1945 even Adolf Hitler knew that the war was lost. Soviet forces were within 45 miles of Berlin. American forces had crossed the Rhine and were well on their way to encircling the remaining German defenders. But Hitler didn’t believe that he had failed. He believed that he had been failed by the German people.

So on March 19 he issued the “Decree concerning demolitions in the Reich territory,” which has come to be known as the Nerobefehl or Nero decree. It ordered the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure — supposedly to deny that infrastructure to the Allies, but the obvious purpose was to punish his own country.

Fortunately, Albert Speer and other Nazi officials didn’t carry out the order....

Why am I recounting this history? Obviously because I’m thinking about what will happen after the midterms.

Actually, as Berlin's Deutschlandmuseum points out, some destruction did take place in response to Hitler's order: "almost all of the Rhine bridges from Switzerland to the North Sea were destroyed – and only a lack of time prevented even more destruction." The museum explains Hitler's thinking:

All transport, industrial or supply facilities that could benefit the Allies were to be destroyed before they fell into enemy hands. Hitler told Albert Speer that the needs of the German civilian population were unimportant. As the “best Germans” had already died, those who were set to survive the war would be of no value to the life of the German nation.

It's hard to imagine Trump thinking like Hitler after the midterms. Trump wouldn't seek to punish the American people because he has no interest in the American people one way or another, except to the extent that they provide him with love and fuel his narcissism. Hitler, as Krugman notes, knew he was defeated, but Trump won't believe he lost even if there's a blue tsunami and Democrats win all the close races. He'll tell himself (and his fan base) that the voting was rigged, the polls were rigged, the courts are rigged, the media is rigged, and even so, Republicans would have won if only he'd been on the ballot. Americans still love him!

Trump has an unshakable belief in the Power of Positive Thinking.

TRUST IN TRUMP. "Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!" - President Donald J. Trump. 🇺🇸 https://t.co/CAjU4jM8Jy

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 1, 2026

And, of course, Trump, unlike Hitler, won't have to choose between death and surrender. Krugman says that Trump "will retain immense capacity to inflict destruction on America, not to mention America’s allies." I agree that he'll "retain immense capacity," thanks to the Supreme Court, the Senate filibuster, and America's Framers, who gave us a constitution that was unsuited to a nation with a two-party system, with its requirement of a two-thirds vote to convict in the Senate after a president or other official is impeached. Trump will still have a lot of power, and he'll use it, narcissistically.

Krugman thinks he's already raining destruction on America's allies.

Over the past few days, according to President Zelenskyy, Ukraine has received no warning from the West about impending Russian missile strikes. This could reflect technical problems. But anyone dismissing the possibility that Trump is trying to punish Ukraine for daring to deny victory to his friend Vladimir Putin must have slept through the past two years.

But Trump doesn't see Ukraine as America's ally. Trump sees Russia as Amerca's ally.

In domestic matters, Krugman notes this:

At home, Trump officials suddenly cut down hundreds of trees at a public golf course in Washington. Trump has long wanted to remake that golf course to his own taste, but that’s unlikely to happen given the political winds, and in any case there was no need to rush the destruction. This was almost surely an act of spite, of deliberate act vandalism, undertaken precisely because Trump knows he won’t get his way.

But Trump doesn't regard that as destruction. Trump doesn't like nature. He's never shown the slightest appreciation for it. Trump likes golf courses -- that's the only kind of greenery he appreciates. He likes patios, and built a replica of the one at Mar-a-Lago in place of the White House Rose Garden. Trump doesn't think that's destruction. Trump thinks that's beautification. (And he undoubtedly believes he'll get to build that golf course one way or another.)

Krugman is right about this:

Think of the Kennedy Center, a national icon that Trump is destroying because he can’t put his own name on it, as the model for what is all too likely to happen to America over the next two years.

But he'd rather rebuild it, in his own gaudy, tacky way, and with his name on the building. Maybe he'll tear it down after the midterms, but if he does, he'll begin the process of replacing it with something gaudy and tacky and bearing his name.

Trump won't issue a Nero decree. Just the opposite: He'll keep trying to build grandiose crap and force it all on the rest of us. That's better, but not by much.

THE MEDIA COVERS ELON MUSK LIKE BLIND MEN DESCRIBING AN ELEPHANT

You probably know the parable of the blind men who tried to describe an elephant:

The first blind man put out his hand and touched the side of the elephant. “How smooth! An elephant is like a wall.” The second blind man put out his hand and touched the trunk of the elephant. “How round! An elephant is like a snake.” The third blind man put out his hand and touched the tusk of the elephant. “How sharp! An elephant is like a spear.” The fourth blind man put out his hand and touched the leg of the elephant. “How tall! An elephant is like a tree.” The fifth blind man reached out his hand and touched the ear of the elephant. “How wide! An elephant is like a fan.” The sixth blind man put out his hand and touched the tail of the elephant. “How thin! An elephant is like a rope.”

An argument ensued, each blind man thinking his own perception of the elephant was the correct one. The Rajah, awakened by the commotion, called out from the balcony. “The elephant is a big animal,” he said. “Each man touched only one part. You must put all the parts together to find out what an elephant is like.”

Enlightened by the Rajah’s wisdom, the blind men reached agreement. “Each one of us knows only a part. To find out the whole truth we must put all the parts together.”

I'm thinking about this as I read The New York Times today and see reports on Elon Musk's handiwork. In her "On Politics" newsletter, Jess Bidgood tells us about Musk's campaign spending on behalf of Republicans:

For Republicans, Christmas came in July.

That’s when Elon Musk began funneling more than $276 million into the party’s efforts to save its majorities in Congress, my colleague Teddy Schleifer has learned.

It is a stonkingly large amount of money, and it includes, in sum, one of the biggest political donations in history: $158 million to Senate Republicans’ main super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund.

It means that when we talk about the Republicans’ considerable outside spending advantage over Democrats in this midterm, we are talking, in large part, about Musk’s personal contributions.

And it means that a mercurial figure who once backed off political spending is back in the game.

The ensuing conversation is all about Musk the Republican donor -- how much he's giving, the fact that he's not personally on the campaign trail, how little he's tweeting about politics. The rest of Musk's life seems almost irrelevant to Bidgood and Schleifer. In the linked story by Schleifer, we're told about Musk's get-out-the-vote efforts, the issues that motivate him (trans people), and the specifics of his spending. Again, the rest of his life is treated as irrelevant, apart from this passage, which is more concerned about his relationship with Donald Trump:

Mr. Musk, who oversees a vast business empire that has benefited from enormous federal contracts, is famously unpredictable and often jumps from one project to another. He has been far quieter about his political work since his dramatic blowup with Mr. Trump last year. After months of wielding vast influence inside the White House and overseeing Mr. Trump’s government cost-cutting project, he raged against the president’s major domestic policy bill and floated threats to start a third party.

But the two men have warmed back up, appearing together at three events in the last two weeks and praising each other.

Meanwhile, we have this story today about the war between Russia and Ukraine:

Ukraine said that its military, with no warning, had lost partial access to Starlink, a pillar of its battlefield communications. Kyiv relies on a militarized version of the wireless internet network paid for by the Pentagon. That led Ukrainian officials and analysts to surmise that the restrictions had come from Washington, as President Trump is locked in his latest feud with Ukraine’s leadership....

The Starlink development was interpreted in Ukraine as part of a Trump administration pressure campaign to limit Ukraine’s ability to fight. Mr. Trump is pushing Kyiv to stop attacking oil refineries so that Russia can pump more diesel onto global markets as high prices threaten the prospects of Mr. Trump’s Republican Party in the midterm elections.

The head of Starlink is mentioned only briefly.

SpaceX, which operates Starlink, and its chief executive, Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

And there's an op-ed about the Ebola crisis in Africa, written by Heather Kerr, the International Rescue Committee's country director for Congo. Kerr writes:

I have worked in humanitarian health in this region for decades and helped lead responses to several Ebola outbreaks. I have never seen one get this far ahead of us.

One reason:

Before 2025, U.S. government funding supported disease surveillance, outbreak preparedness and treatment programs run by humanitarian organizations across eastern Congo. That funding was sharply reduced as part of broader cuts last year. Budget reductions forced my organization, the International Rescue Committee, to cut funding to the health facilities focused on primary care in the Ituri Province, where this outbreak began.

In clinics in Ituri, the funding cuts have meant going without the surveillance tools needed to flag Ebola symptoms early, allowing the virus to spread before we can catch up.

Kerr never mentions Elon Musk by name. She doesn't mention DOGE. I don't blame her -- Musk and Trump can be extremely vindictive, and it's best not to risk further assaults on foreign aid to Africa. But this yet another depiction of Musk that feels like one blind person's hand on an elephant.

Last month, the Times reported that child sexual abuse material continues to appear on Musk's X:

A review by the Canadian Center for Child Protection found that the site’s own artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, responded to requests from users by creating dozens of sexualized and sometimes sexually explicit photos of children, including victims previously known to law enforcement, at the beginning of the year. The images included children in sexualized poses with partially exposed genitals, in states of undress and with fluid on their faces.

A separate analysis by The New York Times found that during the first half of the year, users on X posted child sexual abuse material previously flagged by authorities, including some of the most egregious content that the site attempts to block using automated filters.

But this never seems to come up in mainstream-media stories about Musk as a high-rolling Republican donor, or about Musk as a government contractor, or about Musk doing Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump's bidding with Starlink.

And what the Times told us in June about Musk's role in European racist unrest also doesn't come up in these stories:

On Tuesday and Wednesday, protesters in Belfast who were furious about an attack by a Sudanese refugee set fire to cars and property and hurled objects at the police. That followed a night of angry rioting in Southampton last week after new video was released in the murder in December of an 18-year-old college student who was falsely accused by his attacker of having perpetrated a racist assault.

“There’s a playbook,” said Ciarán O’Connor, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which researches extremism, hate and disinformation globally. “An incident of violence like this is identified and rapidly amplified by not just a domestic but a global, transnational, far-right ecosystem who use such incidents to absorb them into their own kind of international narrative.”

... Britain is especially vulnerable because it shares the English language with the United States, which she said makes it easier for right-wing groups there to use the American-based social media companies to stoke anger from afar.

That was the case on Tuesday, when Elon Musk, the owner of X, called for people to “REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY” protest in Belfast. He highlighted an image that listed protest locations distributed by Tommy Robinson, an anti-Muslim agitator in Britain with multiple criminal convictions....

Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats Party in Britain, denounced what he called a pattern in which a brutal crime “makes us all feel immense pain and anger, and then extremists who exploit that grief and anger to spread hatred and violence, aided and abetted by social media barons like Elon Musk.”

Why is a fomentor of global racist agitation, publisher of computer-generated child porn, and ally of Moscow's dictator discussed as just another rich Republican donor, even as the budget cuts he oversaw during his first stint in government cause widespread death? Because our media covers all of these aspects of Musk's life in isolation. Every story is siloed. Every reporter is a blind man feeling an elephant.

Jamelle Bouie is right to ask this:

is there anyone thinking/writing about the actual mechanics of disentangling the US government from elon musk?

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) October 11, 2026 at 8:44 PM

The ansswer appears to be no. I think that's largely because our political culture is terrified of offending rich people and doesn't want to report on Elon Musk in full, because then we'd see him for what he rzeally is, a full-spectrum criminal, racist, and sociopath. We're never supposed to see the whole elephant.

THE RIGHT'S NEW LINE ON TALARICO AND FLU-GHAZI: OUR COMPLETELY FABRICATED RUMORS WERE FAKE BUT ACCURATE

The non-Republican media believes that the GOP's disinformation about James Talarico's absence from the campaign trail is a disaster for the disinformationists. The San Antonio Current's headline is "Conspiracy Claim About James Talarico Mental Breakdown Blows Up in Right-Wingers’ Faces." The Daily Beast says, "MAGA’s Conspiracy About Dem Star Dealt Humiliating Blow." Rolling Stone says, "The Right’s Desperate Conspiracy Theory About James Talarico Goes Up in Flames."

But right-wingers don't believe they failed -- and in their vacuum-sealed information bubble, they didn't. They know we can read what they're saying, and they know that the facts disprove their rumor of a secret stay at an Ohio mental facility (both The New York Times and CBS News have examined images from a home security system and report that the images prove Talarico was at home during the period of his alleged stay in Ohio), so they're acknowledging that, yeah, their story was fake news. But they insist that the campaign-trail absence proves that something is fishy about this Talarico fellow.

In an overheated post that runs nearly four thousand words, the Daily Wire's Matt Walsh acknowledges much of the evidence that debunks the rumormongers, including the Ohio facility's assertion that Talarico was never a patient.

Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.

— Lindner Center HOPE (@LindnerCtrHope) October 11, 2026

Walsh concedes that the story was fake.

So that’s a pretty definitive statement. For his part, Talarico then responded to the post from the facility, saying he’s never even been to Ohio.

Which is true.

I’ve never even been to Ohio 😂

— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) October 12, 2026

But, Walsh says, doesn't it seem as if the story was ... fake but accurate?

A couple of things about this. Number one — it’s very possible Talarico and his campaign are hiding something. But we do have to concede that, as for the mental health institution in Ohio, this looks like a fraudulent story that was planted by GOP operatives. Maybe they were right “directionally,” as people like to say. There are reasons to think there’s something strange going on here.

And what are the "reasons"? What's Walsh's evidence that "there’s something strange going on"? Well ... just look at Talarico! He obviously didn't have a bad flu -- and he's obviously a psycho!

On September 30, Talarico was scheduled to participate in an in-person interview with the CEO of the United States Hispanic Business Council. He attended via Zoom instead, claiming he had the flu — even though, as the event moderator pointed out, he looked fine.

No one has ever had a bad flu while appearing to be healthy! Everyone knows that!

... putting aside the question of his health, it needs to be said that this has to be one of the most patronizing and phony candidates to ever run for office in this country.

Just by looking at him, you can tell that if he thought it would help him win this race, James Talarico would not hesitate to sacrifice your elderly grandmother to the gods, Aztec-style. No one is buying the idea that this guy decided out of the goodness of his heart to self-quarantine just a couple of weeks before early voting begins in one of the most important elections of the year. But we’re supposed to believe that he “couldn’t live with himself” if he infected a random person with — what, a head cold?

Walsh, who is not a doctor and who has apparently never had a bad flu or met someone who has a bad flu, continues his expert diagnosis:

That’s the other problem here. On Zoom, he comes across as someone who’s mildly congested. Whatever “fever” he has, it’s obviously a very mild one. The interview lasted an hour, and he was answering questions without any issues whatsoever.

This is why he felt the need to explicitly state that he’s very sick, and that he’s trying to protect innocent men, women, and children from his horrific illness. If he didn’t spell it out for everyone, no one would have any idea he’s sick. Even the event moderator seemed confused by the whole thing. And then he claims he’s “at his most contagious” during the virtual event, which means he shouldn’t be much sicker than he currently is. That should be the point where the fever breaks, and things begin to return to normal in a couple of days.

Walsh writes:

What we can say with certainty is that it’s extremely unusual for a candidate — who, at all appearances, was not seriously ill — to disappear from the campaign trail at a pivotal moment, for nearly two weeks.

And then, once he'd gotten better, he looked ... better! Isn't that suspicious?

Talarico finally appeared for an interview on Sunday with a local news station to explain what had happened. And he didn’t help matters.

Everything about this interview — his demeanor and his answers — makes it seem much, much more likely that he’s lying. Right off the bat, he looks perfectly healthy. If you just spent two weeks battling the flu — an illness that left you bedridden and unable to campaign for the most important election of your life, or even speak on a Zoom call — then you simply don’t look this healthy and normal when you go out in public. His weight hasn’t changed at all. It’s bizarre.

It was ... the flu! He should be scarred for life! Am I right?

Walsh isn't the only Republican propagandist who's arguing that Flu-ghazi still looks suspicious, even though the mental facility story was obviously false. Here's longtime GOP attack dog Mary Katherine Ham on X:

And here's Fox's Liz Peek:

His disappearance gave rise to a whirlwind of apparently erroneous rumors. Because Talarico has voiced some wacky ideas in the past, like believing there are six genders or that God is non-binary — which he has been forced to walk back — some voters are primed to believe such rumors....

Undoubtedly, Talarico’s progressive young base will not be deterred by his peculiar walk-about, but his lengthy absence from the campaign trail casts a cloud over his run.

Let me tell you what's going to happen to this narrative on the right. It won't be abandoned, any more that "Trump won the 2020 election" has been abandoned -- and, for that matter, any more than "Michelle Obama is a man" has been abandoned. At minimum, it will be a shibboleth, an in-joke to be shared with the like-minded, especially if Talarico becomes a senator. Any time there's a negative story about him, or even a trivial health story about him, Republicans will snigger among themselves at the frail little soyboy (even though, by that time, he will be the frail little soyboy who beat them like a rented mule). They'll all continue to believe that something was wrong, and therefore it doesn't matter that their master narrative was completely fraudulent. They'll keep pulling at the few remaining loose threads (though the only one I know of that's still unexplained is the fact that Talarico said once that he went to urgent care and later said he saw his primary care physician). They'll insist they were right for as long as Talarico is in public life, because the truth means nothing to them. The prime directive is: never apologize and stay on offense. They're all Roy Cohn.