Over the last decade or so, Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been subtle about his support for Vladimir Putin, but in recent weeks, the American president has gone to almost cartoonish lengths to reward his Russian counterpart.

The list includes instances in which the Republican has offered sanctions relief for Russian diesel fuel, echoed Kremlin talking points, pumped billions of dollars into the Russian economy, peddled false accusations against Ukraine, ignored existing U.S. laws that ban Russian oil imports, looked the other way on Russia aiding Iran during the ongoing U.S. war, and delivered diplomatic victories for Moscow — all in exchange for nothing except more deadly attacks.

On Wednesday morning, however, Trump finally claimed to have secured a concession of sorts from the Russian leader: In a statement published to his social media platform, the American president said Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired teacher who had been imprisoned by the Putin government, has been released from detention and was headed home.

After some pointless and gratuitous whining about the Biden administration, Trump wrote that Putin agreed to free Hubbard “out of respect” for the American president, adding that the United States “was not required to give anything in return — an unprecedented situation for Russia.”

Just 12 minutes later, the Republican published a follow-up item, which read, “Numerous people, who requested that sanctions be immediately imposed on Russia, have called to apologize to President Trump in that they didn’t know that he was negotiating the release of Stephen Hubbard, a truly big and important deal for the U.S. If sanctions would have been placed, certainly those negotiations would have come to a complete and total halt.”

Putting aside the fact that those calls of apology almost certainly didn’t happen in reality, the second message clearly contradicted the first: After saying his administration didn’t have to give Russia anything to secure Hubbard’s release, Trump effectively conceded that he had to waive sanctions on Russia in order to secure Hubbard’s release.

Hours later, at an unrelated White House event, he did it again.

TRUMP: We gave nothing in exchange for Stephen. We never give anything in exchange for hostages.TRUMP LITERALLY MOMENTS LATER: If I implemented sanctions on Russia, Steven wouldn't be coming out right now.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-21T19:33:20.698Z

“We gave nothing in exchange, which is very rare,” the American president boasted. “We never give anything in exchange.” Moments later, he added that if he’d implemented sanctions on Russia, as required by the U.S. law Trump recently signed, Hubbard “wouldn’t be coming out right now, he’d be in there for another 20 years.”

Trump seemed entirely oblivious to the obvious tension between claiming that he made no concessions, except for the concessions he made.

During a Wednesday afternoon Q&A with reporters, CNN’s Kaitlin Collins pressed him on this point, subtly trying to explain to Trump that, based on his own explanation, he obviously did give Putin something in return for Hubbard’s release.

Apparently frustrated by the cognitive dissonance, Trump decided to resolve the dispute by telling Collins, “You’re a low-IQ person. You’re a dummy.”

Hours later, Russia launched a new round of attacks on Ukraine’s capital, killing one person and wounding 22, as part of an assault that targeted civilians. A day earlier, Russia also unleashed another missile and drone blitz of civilian areas in Ukraine, killing at least four people.

As recently as Monday, Trump told reporters, “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine, they haven’t been doing much.” The White House has not yet explained why the Republican routinely sounds like he’s reading from a script written by the Kremlin.

The post Trump struggles to keep his story straight on prisoner release from Russia appeared first on MS NOW.

President Donald Trump heads to Iowa on Thursday, looking to energize his base as he touts a financial-support plan to reassure farmers, a key constituency that has been hit hard by rising prices.

It’s another campaign trip to a reliably red state that has become surprisingly competitive. Trump won Iowa three times — carrying it by 13 points in 2024 — but this year several Republicans are in tight races.

Returning to Iowa for the first time in nearly 10 months, Trump will campaign, in part, for Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP Senate hopeful who is running to fill retiring Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s seat. Hinson and her Democratic rival, state Rep. Josh Turek, are almost neck and neck in polling averages from MS NOW/FiftyPlusOne.

“There are a number of Senate seats in play that we did not expect to be in play,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “[Trump’s] record and his approach are likely to appeal much more to members of his base than they are to independent or swing voters.”

Thursday’s rally at Sioux Gateway Airport is the first of at least two planned visits to Iowa by the president in the final stretch of the midterms. The president’s campaign blitz in typically Republican strongholds reflects shifts in the political landscape in a midterm that initially favored the GOP.

“The problem right now is that people perceive that the economy is not better, and inflation has not only not come down, but it’s higher,” Ayres said.

A GOP strategist familiar with Republicans’ thinking in the midterms, granted anonymity to speak freely about internal strategies, told MS NOW the president’s visits to some of the reddest districts in states like Iowa in the final days of the campaign are part of a deliberate strategy to maximize turnout by loyal Trump voters in key races.

“Specifically, the 4th District, where we’re deploying him, is the heart of the base, the heart of Republican support,” the strategist said. “If we can churn out our base voters in that area, Democrats’ path to winning the state just shrinks dramatically.”

Seeking to address the financial hardships hitting major agricultural states like Iowa, the Trump administration has announced an $8 billion relief package for farmers and construction plans for a $15 billion steel plant in the state. The president himself has also touted new foreign trade deals to export American farm products and other efforts to boost farmers and ranchers.

But some farmers MS NOW spoke to say Trump’s trade deals have made little impact on their businesses as their operating costs have increased from rising diesel and fertilizer prices. And the president’s announcement that he would lower tariffs on ground beef from Argentina earlier this year came as a blow to the state’s cattle industry, with both Hinson and Turek calling the policy a bad idea.

Craig Moss, a fifth-generation cattle and hog farmer from Hull, about 50 miles north of Sioux City, told MS NOW the volatile cattle market had been “rough” in the past year, in part because of the president’s lifting of tariffs on Argentine ground beef.

“Trump makes a trade deal with Argentina, and then when he’s questioned about it by reporters, he says, ‘You don’t know anything about what’s going on over there,’” Moss said. “Well, sir, you don’t know anything about the cattle market.”

Moss said the current diesel price “kind of stinks,” adding that the ongoing Iran war was to blame. Still, Moss, who voted for Trump in the past, said he agreed with the president on most issues and did not regret voting for him before.

Julius Schaaf, a corn-and-soybean farmer of more than 40 years based in Fremont County, voted against Trump in past elections and said the current volatility in the farming industry was because of Trump’s trade policies. Schaaf criticized the administration as a “rude and difficult” trading partner.

“A lot of the people that supported him were farmers that have a lot of equity in their property, and they can weather a storm for a while,” Schaaf said. “But you talk to the young guys that are just getting started and trying to buy inputs and inputs have gone through the roof — they’re the ones that are really struggling.”

Vice President JD Vance addressed some of those concerns last month at a rally in the state, telling supporters that the Trump administration’s trade and tax policies have directly benefited farmers and blue-collar workers. He has also sought to show understanding of economic realities, acknowledging the high cost of gas and telling voters “we’re working on it.” Trump, for his part, has at times downplayed those concerns, calling the focus on affordability a “hoax” and insisting that prices would plummet once the Iran war ends.

Many Iowans across the political spectrum whom MS NOW spoke with agreed that their No. 1 concern was the cost of living. And while Trump’s performance got mixed reviews, they still had not decided how they would vote in the Senate and House races.

Tiffany, an Iowa voter who backed Trump in 2024, plans to vote in the midterm races but said she is currently undecided. Her top issue: the cost of living, she said, because “prices keep going up.”

“If you can’t afford to put gas in your car, how can you go to work to make money to put a roof over your head to put food on your table?” said Tiffany, who asked to go by her first name only. “You can only stretch your penny and your dollars so far until you can’t stretch it anymore.”

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WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump and cabinet officials held a roundtable at the White House on Wednesday to highlight the administration's progress in combating cybercrime, including preventing $1.6 billion in losses and cracking down on sexual extortion.

The post Trump at Roundtable Details Administration’s Crackdown on Cybercrime appeared first on Breitbart.

Rep. Ilhan Omar revealed new details about last week’s federal raid on her home in Washington, D.C., which she said was “designed” to intimidate her. The Minnesota Democrat sat down with MS NOW’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday for her first interview since federal agents searched her residence as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

Omar, who is the first Somali American member of Congress, said she had returned home from traveling and was only asleep for 2 1/2 hours before she was awakened by agents “pounding on the doors” on Oct. 12. The congresswoman told Hayes her first thought was that “something was on fire.”

“You don’t show up to somebody’s house that early in the morning unless you’re trying to freak them out. And you know it obviously did freak all of us out,” Omar said.

“It sounded like an urgent evacuation sort-of situation,” she added. “So it took us a while to figure out what was actually happening.”

When her husband opened the door, Omar said she was presented with a warrant. She also said she was asked to sign a document waiving protections provided to her in the Constitution as a member of Congress. Omar declined.

“That was obnoxious. I couldn’t understand why they would think that I would sign such a thing,” she said.

During the raid, which Omar said lasted four to five hours and involved as many as 25 agents, the authorities “mostly conducted themselves in a decent way” as they searched the home for items in compliance with the warrant, the congresswoman said.

‘A bizarre, bizarre thing’

Omar said the federal agents seized her phone, an old phone, her youngest daughter’s old phone, her husband’s notebooks and a camera he had received from his uncle. She also said they took a Somali phrase book for children, which her husband was using to learn the language.

The Democrat said she was “surprised” when she was handed a receipt for the items.

“To walk away with 17 items of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones was such a bizarre, bizarre thing,” she said.

Asked about the raid on Omar’s house, the Justice Department told MS NOW in a statement last week that Homeland Security Investigations “executed a judicially authorized search warrant” and said it was “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”

A source told MS NOW the warrant listed potential violations involving immigration fraud, false statements in immigration proceedings and conspiracy. According to CNN, which cites people familiar with the probe, investigators are looking into whether Omar or her late father made false statements about her age during the citizenship process.

Omar arrived in the United States in March 1995 at the age of 12 after fleeing the civil war in Somalia and spending four years in a refugee camp in Kenya. She later became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000 at 17.

“The people who knocked on my door, searching for papers, literally have his papers,” Omar told Hayes of her father on Wednesday. “They are the ones who processed us to come to the United States.”

While she said she takes the matter “seriously,” she doesn’t believe the federal government has a case to prosecute her.

“It would be a huge undertaking to, I suppose, indict a 12-year-old for being so cleverly conspiring to defraud immigration services to come to the United States,” she said. “I’m sure there are a lot of smart 12-year-olds, but that seems like a leap.”

Trump’s ‘obsession’

This isn’t the first time Omar’s immigration status has been scrutinized. The Washington Post reported that in 2019, during President Donald Trump’s first term, a political appointee asked immigration authorities to look into Omar’s records for any evidence of fraud. But Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to open a full investigation, according to the report.

Omar also told Hayes she did not know about the 2019 probe until she “saw it in The Washington Post reporting a couple of days ago.”

“I did hear that they opened, that there was an opening of my immigration file, but I didn’t know to the extent of what the opening of my investigation meant and who opened it,” she said.

The Wall Street Journal reported the Biden administration also looked into Omar but declined to move forward due to lack of evidence.

When asked if she believes Trump has nothing to do with the ongoing investigation into her, Omar told Hayes, “Absolutely not.”

“He’s got everything to do with it,” she said of Trump, pointing to reported efforts by his first administration to investigate her.

Trump and Omar have had a long-standing, contentious relationship. In 2019, the president attacked Omar and three other Democratic congresswomen in a series of tweets telling them to “go back” to the countries they came from. At a rally days later, Trump criticized Omar by name as the crowd chanted “Send her back.”

Over the years, Trump has frequently repeated unproven rumors about the congresswoman’s personal life, including her immigration status and an unproven conspiracy theory that she had married her brother to bypass U.S. laws.

In 2025, Omar told The Guardian she believes Trump has an “unhealthy and creepy obsession” with her.

Omar told Hayes she suspects the raid was partly the president making good on his promise after years of threatening the congresswoman.

“They’ve done this sort of full press where they kept alluding to the fact that something was going to happen to me,” she said. “And I think a lot of their right-wing influencers, who seem to have direct connection to not just the president but his orbit, I think they were starting to lose faith that these were empty promises and they had to do something. I believe to say, ‘Hey, look, we raided her house.’”

The 44-year-old and mother of three has spoken openly about the surge of death threats she has received since taking office. She told Hayes that she and her family will have to move from their home due to the highly publicized raid.

“Obviously, I can’t continue to live there,” she said. “So we have to figure out where to move to because our address has been public, and with the death threats that I deal with, it’s no longer going to be feasible to be in that house and have my kids visiting off and on, having people track them.”

Despite the challenges, the congresswoman said she would not let the president’s efforts break her.

“In my faith teachings, we believe that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” she said. “I think I’m designed uniquely by God to withstand all of this.”

Omar said she was “confident” in her truth that she did nothing wrong and told Hayes she believed the justice system would prevail.

“If I continue to stand up to bullies and people who are carrying out ungodly corruption, I’m going to be okay,” she said.

This story has been updated to include additional information.

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Top Democrats and allied organizations filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against President Donald Trump and his administration over their attempts to stymie the midterm elections, including by removing voters from state rolls.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., were among the plaintiffs who filed the suit against Trump, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. The 44-page complaint takes aim at recent demands from DHS — notably in Nevada and California — that states review lists compiled by federal officials of alleged noncitizen voters.

As the complaint notes, state officials have disputed the accuracy of those lists.

The lawsuit points to Trump’s Truth Social threat earlier this week threatening that election officials in LA County “will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” if they count the votes of alleged noncitizens. It cites another from U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Aaron Reitz, who said in a social media post on Monday that he would “hunt” and “prosecute” anyone who violates federal election law.

“DOJ’s recent actions confirm that Defendants have settled on a course of intimidating state election officials with threats of criminal prosecution for doing nothing more than adhering to state law and distributing ballots to registered voters,” states the complaint, filed 13 days before the midterms.

The filing alleges the administration’s efforts to wrest control of elections from the states, combined with federal officials’ threats toward local and state officials, violate the Voting Rights Act and constitutional principles that prevent the federal government from forcing states to enact, administer or enforce federal laws.

In addition to Schumer and Jeffries, the plaintiffs include the Democrats’ House and Senate campaign arms, the Democratic Governors Association, the Nevada Democratic Party and Erick Jose Jimenez, a registered California voter who the lawsuit says became a naturalized citizen 20 years ago but fears he could be falsely labeled as a noncitizen and “unlawfully targeted” as a result.

The defendants also include Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has said he would “absolutely” consider taking the issue to the Supreme Court; and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who has said his department will penalize states that do not cooperate with the federal government’s demands. The plaintiffs are asking the court to find the defendants in violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act and to block them from continuing those actions.

“None of this is lawful,” the complaint states. “The Executive Branch enjoys no authority to superintend state voter list maintenance, to supplant state determinations of who is qualified to vote, or to dictate who gets a ballot or whose ballot gets segregated — Congress has kept that responsibility with the States, subject only to a narrow civil enforcement power the administration has declined to invoke during its recent efforts.”

The lawsuit represents the latest challenge to the administration’s efforts to compel states to hand over their voter rolls, which federal courts have also unanimously struck down. Democrats and elections experts have said these efforts could undermine trust in the upcoming elections. But federal officials have persisted, including by filing a lawsuit against California election officials last week.

Trump administration officials slammed the allegations included in the latest lawsuit.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said “Democrats and the media continue to dismiss concerns about voter fraud,“ adding, “The Trump Administration is taking decisive lawful action to protect our elections including prosecuting election crimes, strengthening election infrastructure security, and protecting vulnerable voters from fraud and coercion.”

DOJ spokesperson Kirsten Pels said “election integrity is a top priority” for the administration, adding, “Every action the Department has taken to protect the integrity of this year’s elections is grounded in the law and being litigated in open court. Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote and that every lawful ballot is counted a requirement of federal law.”

A spokesperson for DHS called the lawsuit “another political stunt by Democrats.”

The case has been assigned to Chief Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg, an Obama appointee who presided over the first lawsuit challenging the deportation and imprisonment of alleged Tren de Aragua gang members. During an emergency hearing in March 2025, Boasberg ordered that no additional flights to El Salvador could take off; Trump subsequently called him a “Radical Left Lunatic.”

Boasberg was also the subject of a judicial misconduct complaint filed by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff in July 2025, based on his alleged comments during a panel conversation at the annual Judicial Conference. According to the complaint, Boasberg predicted that the administration “would ‘disregard rulings of federal courts’ and trigger ‘a constitutional crisis.’” The chief judge of the 6th Circuit, Jeffrey Sutton, dismissed that complaint earlier this year.

Lisa Rubin and Selena Kuznikov contributed to this report.

CORRECTION (Oct. 21, 2026, 10:31 p.m. ET):
A previous version of this article misrepresented a statement from White House spokesperson Lauren Bis. Bis claimed that “Democrats and the media” dismiss concerns about voter fraud, but she did not herself dismiss voter fraud concerns.

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Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito further distanced themselves from their Supreme Court colleagues on Wednesday when they were the only two jurists to note their objections to the court’s refusal to let the Trump administration immediately enforce its preferred policy on gender-affirming care in prison.

The court’s unsigned order contained no explanation from the majority or the dissenting duo. Still, it’s the latest data point showing Thomas and Alito backing the administration even when their fellow GOP appointees — including President Donald Trump’s own three appointees — decline to do so.

Wednesday’s order follows last month’s Supreme Court rejection of Trump’s desired mail-ballot restrictions for the midterm elections. That loss led the president to lash out at the court, including his own appointees, while calling Thomas and Alito “legends.”

Asked during a recently published CBS News interview about a Wall Street Journal study showing that Alito sided with Trump more than any of his colleagues, the justice said he’s “not trying to decide cases to help President Trump.”

Whatever his or Thomas’ intentions, their latest actions spotlight their dynamic of voting for the president’s position when other justices don’t. Their votes come ahead of the rapidly approaching Election Day in less than two weeks, with voters set to determine which party will control Senate confirmation of justices for the near future.

Alito said he’s staying on the court at least through this court term, even if Democrats win back Senate control. Thomas has likewise not signaled that he is stepping down imminently. If he stays on the court through the next term, he will become the longest-serving justice ever. In their late 70s, Thomas and Alito are the two eldest members of the current court, but they aren’t very old by the court’s historical standards.

Yet if Trump has an opportunity to appoint their successors or any other justices before he leaves office in 2029, their latest votes underscore why he will likely model his next selection(s) on them, rather than on the justices he has put on the bench thus far, who have backed him in a series of significant cases but not all of them.

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

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By any fair measure, Donald Trump’s second term has been brutal for the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a variety of reasons. At the heart of the problem is the president’s stated determination not merely to brazenly politicize federal disaster aid, but to destroy the agency altogether, for reasons he has struggled to explain.

In May 2025, then-acting FEMA chief Cameron Hamilton testified before Congress that it would be in the public’s interest if FEMA continued to exist. He was fired the next day, because Hamilton’s line was at odds with Trump’s stated position, which is that FEMA should be destroyed and states left to their own devices.

A year later, after quite a few acting FEMA administrators had come and gone, the president made an unexpected move: He brought Hamilton back for a second stint, and the Senate confirmed him soon after.

I can’t help but notice that Hamilton’s position is far more in line with the White House’s than it was early last year. Politico reported:

The Trump administration’s disaster chief told state officials Tuesday they must increase their financial reserves and emergency capabilities to handle most disasters on their own, without federal help.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Cameron Hamilton gave unprecedented detail at a conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, about the administration’s long-planned shift of disaster responsibilities to states.

“Every state must have the appropriate financial reserves” and other abilities “to ensure that recovery efforts can start immediately and not necessarily be held up simply because of the federal [disaster] declaration process,” Hamilton said, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by Politico.

“A future that I hope we would shoot for is one where we wouldn’t require as many disasters because the capability of states is so high and so substantial,” Hamilton added, referring to presidential authorizations of federal disaster aid.

Whether the current FEMA chief is allowed to say so or not, the Trump-backed model that Hamilton endorsed will not and cannot work. State and local governments simply do not have the wherewithal — financial resources, personnel, equipment, etc. — to respond to major disasters. It’s why FEMA was created in the first place: The federal government can marshal effective responses before and after a crisis in ways others cannot.

As Politico’s report added, Eric Holdeman, a longtime emergency management official, wrote on LinkedIn on Monday in response to Hamilton’s memo, “There are many states with [minuscule] emergency management offices and budgets. There are states with slim rainy-day funds and no capacity to make up for a lack of federal disaster recovery funds — without RAISING TAXES!”

Holdeman added, “Reducing the number of federal disaster declarations will be difficult and its implementation will be impossible! All Presidents, not just the one we have today, will ignore such a policy when it becomes politically expedient to do so.”

Nevertheless, in the leaked audio recording of Hamilton’s comments, the FEMA administrator said to expect changes to get underway in earnest “in the next six months.”

If there’s a Democratic Congress next year, it’s a safe bet that the administration will get meaningful pushback long before such plans are implemented. Watch this space.

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As Donald Trump’s administration bows to Russia in disturbing ways, top MAGA influencers in the “America First” movement are getting in on the Russophilia by increasingly wedding themselves to leaders and nations that are effectively under Vladimir Putin’s thumb.

And a newly announced conference in Serbia is a prime example.

On Monday, the Conservative Political Action Conference revealed plans to hold a convention in Belgrade in November. Other recent CPAC conventions abroad have effectively served as authoritarian pep rallies, and the Serbia gathering seems like it will be no different. CPAC is touting an appearance by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who has earned the moniker “Little Putin” for his deference to the Russian strongman.

Announcing the inaugural CPAC Balkans — Belgrade, Serbia, November 18–21, 2026.

President Aleksandar Vučić will headline our first-ever conference in Southeastern Europe, bringing together conservative leaders from across the region united around sovereignty, faith, family, free… pic.twitter.com/J4OpPU5ryz

— CPAC (@CPAC) October 19, 2026

It’s notable that this convention was announced amid reporting, including from MS NOW’s David Rohde, about former Trump campaign officials’ advocacy on behalf of pro-Putin Serbian nationalists.

Vučić is comparable to Trump in that he is viewed by some as a Putin stooge who has opposed sanctions on Russia and effectively aided the Kremlin’s efforts to destabilize the European Union. And, like Trump, he has been the standard-bearer for an increasingly illiberal political party, one that has sought to manipulate electoral systems in its favor.

Given all of this, it’s no wonder why MAGA world adores Serbia’s current leadership: This is a movement broadly infatuated with authoritarianism. But it’s noteworthy that, much like with Russia, even some conservatives are wary of Serbia’s antidemocratic backsliding.

Ahead of Serbia’s parliamentary elections this weekend, a bipartisan group of seven senators — including Republicans from Iowa, Mississippi and North Carolina — issued a warning about Vučić’s party.

“Unfortunately, both Serbian and international election observers found serious infringements to the integrity of the previous parliamentary elections in 2022. We are now seeing similarly troubling signs ahead of the October 25 vote,” the senators said in a statement. “Reports of unlawful wiretapping of opposition members and attempts to discredit and undermine election observation missions are deeply concerning, and Serbian authorities must ensure a level playing field for all parties and open access to the polls for all citizens.”

It’s telling of the MAGA movement’s broad disdain for democracy that one of its most prominent activist groups is openly choosing to associate with such a party. And it speaks to a movement that seems more obsessed with expanding its influence in foreign lands than addressing the numerous crises their dear leader has created for Americans at home.

The post Republicans are taking CPAC to Serbia as the party bows to Putin appeared first on MS NOW.

Most Americans probably understand that politics can be an ugly business. As long as there have been campaigns, there have been candidates and parties trying to appeal to voters’ worst instincts by aiming for the gutter.

But once in a while, a campaign ad comes along that manages to disgust a wide variety of decent people, regardless of party or ideology. MS NOW reported:

In a new, unaired attack ad against Amy Acton, the Democrat running for governor of Ohio, her estranged mother speaks directly to the camera to accuse her of lying about her past.

“Don’t vote for people who lie,” says Donna Arthur — who married a man whom Acton accused of sexually abusing her as a child — in the video.

The campaign team for Vivek Ramaswamy, Acton’s Republican rival, confirmed to The Associated Press that it produced the ad and plans to spend $4 million airing it, apparently indifferent to the condemnations.

“It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said in a statement.

“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,” Stearns added. “This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core — a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”

Plenty of Republicans also slammed the vile attack, including former GOP presidential contender Nikki Haley, who said via social media that Ramaswamy is “a bad guy.”

One day later, however, JD Vance traveled to Ohio, in large part in the hopes of boosting Ramaswamy, who’s trailed Acton in several recent statewide polls, with time running out in the election cycle. Any chance the vice president might take the high road on the year’s most offensive attack ad?

Evidently not.

On Wednesday morning, Vance, himself an Ohio Republican, initially said the propriety of the ad (or lack thereof) was “not really my concern.” But he didn’t stop there.

Reporter: "Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign put out a controversial ad featuring his opponent's mother…was [that] appropriate?"Vance: "I'm a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans…whining more about that ad than they are about what…Democrats want to do to the United States of America."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-10-21T16:25:47.443Z

“I have to admit that I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” the vice president said.

In other words, Vance isn’t disgusted by the ad, which features a woman who sided with her alleged rapist husband over her own daughter, whom she calls a “liar”; Vance is disgusted by Republicans who have a problem with that ad.

Soon after, the vice president headlined a rally and went even further, insisting that the commercial “calls it out like it is.” Vance went on to accuse Acton of somehow controlling independent news organizations, adding that Ramaswamy has never complained about any of the criticisms he’s faced — which might be credible if anyone had ever targeted the GOP nominee with an ad this abhorrent.

We’ll see soon enough whether the commercial ends up backfiring on Ramaswamy, who almost certainly wouldn’t have pursued such an attack if he thought he was likely to win the gubernatorial race. But in the meantime, Vance just faced a test of his personal character, and he flunked.

The post JD Vance is ‘disgusted,’ not by Ramaswamy’s vile ad but by its bipartisan critics appeared first on MS NOW.

A group of veterans has made very serious claims about contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, a U.S. Marine Corps training facility in North Carolina. The fact that Donald Trump brought this up at his latest campaign rally in the state was unexpected, but more important still is what the president promised to do.

Trump on Camp Lejeune water contamination claims: "If we win the House and Senate, I am directing the Department of Justice to settle all remaining legitimate claims as soon as possible … if we don't win, there's no money."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-21T00:56:42.020Z

“[I]f we win the House and the Senate,” he said, referring to Republicans, “I am directing the Department of Justice to settle all remaining legitimate claims as soon as possible and get it off the books and get it finished.”

Trump added moments later, however, “If we don’t win, there’s no money. If we do win, you’re getting it.”

For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that, in the recent past, it would’ve been considered a real controversy for an incumbent to talk about “directing” his Justice Department to do much of anything.

Instead, what we’re left with is another extraordinary example of Trump’s radical approach to transactional politics: He’ll deliver worthwhile results, the president keeps saying, but only if voters make him happy by delivering the election results he wants to see.

Consider the recent pattern:

Sept. 16: Trump told a North Carolina audience he wouldn’t approve federal disaster relief funds for the state unless they elected former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley to the Senate. (He seemed to be kidding about this, though it wasn’t funny, and with him, it’s sometimes tough to tell.)

Oct. 3: Trump told an Ohio audience that his administration would “very strongly” consider the state for the Space Force Academy, but only if Republicans win in the midterms.

Oct. 3: At the same campaign rally, the president said he might look unfavorably at the state’s future emergency aid requests if they don’t elect a Republican governor.

Oct. 17: Trump told a Kentucky audience that his administration would invest in a local economic revitalization project, but only if his preferred GOP Senate candidate won.

Oct. 19: Trump told a Kansas audience he was prepared to approve a yearlong waiver for selling fuel blended with 15% ethanol (the E15 policy), but if Kansans elect a Democratic senator, “I’m not doing it.”

Almost daily: At effectively every 2026 campaign rally, Trump vows to send $5,000 checks to every American adult — but only if the election results make him happy. (On Tuesday night in North Carolina, the president explicitly said, “If we lose, you get nothing. You’re going to get nothing. If we lose, you get nothing.”)

The Camp Lejeune comments were outrageous, but they were clearly part of an unsubtle pattern.

In case this isn’t obvious, there’s nothing about a Democratic-led Congress that would prevent Trump from delivering any of these benefits to any of these states. The president made the policy commitments conditional anyway, not because he had to, but because he chose to.

In any normal American election, candidates tell voters about the kinds of priorities they’ll advance if elected. That’s not controversial in the slightest. What Trump is saying is qualitatively different — and vastly worse. The incumbent Republican is effectively telling voters, in state after state, that he could deliver for them, but if he’s not satisfied with the election results, he simply won’t bother.

So they better make sure he’s satisfied with the election results.

Trump has goodies he wants to hand out, and the public will benefit from his benevolence — unless voters dare to hurt his feelings. This isn’t how elections are supposed to work in a healthy democracy. Evidently, the president doesn’t care.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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As part of an extended riff on his animosity toward Europe and the NATO alliance, Donald Trump did express a degree of gratitude toward the traditional U.S. allies about a development that only happened in the president’s imagination.

Trump says NATO was "nice enough to give us Greenland. We got Greenland."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T18:44:47.130Z

NATO members, the president asserted, “were nice enough to give us Greenland, despite all the bad talk.”

“‘Oh, he’s not going to get it,’” Trump added, mocking his critics. “We got it; we got Greenland.”

No, we didn’t.

To be sure, the rhetoric was wrong but familiar. At a campaign event in Arizona last week, the president also said that Greenland “was owned by Denmark,” but it has since been added “to our beautiful plate.” Earlier in the day, Trump posted an item to his social media platform in which he referred to “our new and beautiful Greenland,” suggesting U.S. ownership of the Arctic island.

Five days earlier, the president headlined a rally in New York, where he boasted to attendees, “I also, by the way, got Greenland. I hope you’re happy about that.”

I’m not in a position to say with certainty whether Trump is deliberately trying to mislead the public or is genuinely confused about something even he ought to be able to understand. But to the extent that people might be tempted to believe the president, it’s probably worth emphasizing that the United States didn’t “get” Greenland; it’s not “ours”; and at no point was it added to our “plate.” As The New York Times reported in September:

On Tuesday, he signed a document that paves the way to expanding the U.S. military presence on the island, opening new bases. But it explicitly stops short of conveying any territory to the United States. And no one — especially Denmark, which governs the vast but mostly empty space — wanted to emphasize that point, for fear that Mr. Trump might renounce the agreement he had just hailed as “tremendous for Europe and for the United States.”

For Mr. Trump, it was a major retreat. He first raised the possibility of buying Greenland during his first term and never let go of the idea.

I can appreciate why the president finds this embarrassing. He did, after all, make a “100%” guarantee to Americans that he would acquire the island — nine months before he settled for a deal that gave him what he already had.

Joseph Cirincione, the vice chair of the Center for International Policy and a longtime expert on nuclear policy, described the deal as a “complete farce” designed to do little more than “soothe Trump’s unstable ego.”

The more the president peddles nonsense about his imaginary acquisition of Greenland, the more obvious it becomes that he’s still tending to his unstable ego after one of the more notable foreign policy fiascos of his second term.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied the Trump administration’s application to enforce its ban on gender-affirming medical care for federal inmates after a judge blocked the policy.

The denial came in an unexplained order. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito noted they would have granted the administration’s application, but they also did not explain their reasoning.

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said the high court’s action “protects incarcerated trans people from the administration’s attempt to steamroll over constitutional rights for now.” But she added, “the fight to uphold the dignity and respect our community deserves is far from over.”

Urging the justices to lift the judge’s order while it appeals, the administration argued that the public interest favors such a result because the policy “provides appropriate, individualized treatment for gender dysphoria, while disallowing only interventions that are medically unnecessary.”

Lawyers for inmates with the American Civil Liberties Union implored the high court not to back the government’s attempt to “overturn a three decades-long status quo.” They said the government turned to the justices at this preliminary stage of the litigation not because it has a pressing legal claim but rather because it is upset about how the district judge applied settled law to the facts in this case.

Over the past couple of years, the Supreme Court has ruled against transgender people in a series of cases involving sports, the military, passports and gender-affirming care for minors.

When he granted a preliminary injunction for inmates in June, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, said he didn’t want to wade into “the culture war being waged against transgender individuals.” He said he was merely making a legal decision that the government had failed to follow proper procedures when it implemented the new policy.

The Washington judge called the government action “arbitrary and capricious” because it “failed to seriously consider its own experience providing gender-affirming care to inmates for years under its prior policy.” Lamberth issued a subsequent order in August maintaining the injunction, finding that despite officials’ claims, it wouldn’t cause safety issues to continue inmates’ medical care while the litigation proceeds.

Over dissent from a Trump appointee, a federal appellate panel declined to lift Lamberth’s injunction.

In the administration’s application to the justices, Solicitor General John Sauer said the Bureau of Prisons had previously provided both what he called “mental-health treatment (such as psychotherapy and psychiatry services)” and “sex-rejecting interventions (such as sex-trait-modification surgeries, hormone interventions, and social accommodations).”

Sauer said the government concluded it could no longer justify the second category for two reasons: that such interventions weren’t supported by the latest evidence and that they “raised security and prison-administration concerns that outweighed whatever limited benefits they had.”

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

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At an unrelated event in the Oval Office, Donald Trump wasn’t asked about Sen. Elissa Slotkin, but the president apparently felt the need to lash out at the Michigan Democrat anyway.

Trump says that Sen. Slotkin "should be tried … we'll see what happens"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T19:06:12.877Z

“The senator from Michigan made a statement yesterday that was amazing, where they want to frighten people, young people from ever working in the Trump administration or a Republican administration, that they want to go and they want to frighten people,” he said.

Trump added that “even the most liberal commentators” were amazed by Slotkin, whom the president described as a “stupid person” who “made a statement that was very, very dangerous.”

Then, taking it still further, Trump said the senator “should be tried for what she did,” although he didn’t elaborate on what crime he believes Slotkin had committed.

It’s likely that many of those who heard the president’s remark had no idea what he was talking about, even if the Republican’s message was likely well received in some far-right circles.

What Slotkin actually said wasn’t especially remarkable. Last week (the president got the date wrong), the senator spoke at an academic event at the University of Chicago, where she made a brief, unscripted comment about accountability for those who work within a corrupt bureaucracy and discouraged younger people from joining corrupt bureaucracies.

“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’” she said. “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’”

The senator added that meaningful congressional oversight should focus not just on Trump, but on officials who’ve “enabled him” and are “doing his bidding.”

As the discussion continued, Vox’s Astead Herndon noted that Trump has put loyalists in key positions, making it difficult to hold him accountable, at which point Slotkin made the case that shining a light on White House corruption would likely discourage people from joining the administration in its final two years.

The Michigan Democrat made these rather anodyne comments on Tuesday, Oct. 13, and no one seemed to care. No articles about Slotkin’s remarks appeared in any major news organizations the next day, and no one had reason to think presidential threats of prosecution would soon emerge.

But as The Atlantic’s Jon Chait noted, it was roughly five days after the event that “a tidal wave of conservative outrage suddenly crashed over” the senator, with condemnations coming from Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and a variety of conservative media voices. Trump himself told reporters earlier this week, “Slotkin said that there should be prosecutions in order to scare people from going into politics.”

Except that never happened. The president attributed made-up comments to the senator, since the benign truth wasn’t good enough to sustain a credible smear.

Stepping back, a few elements to this nonsensical “controversy” stand out. First, the degree to which Trump and his party appear terrified of any scrutiny, accountability or congressional oversight into corruption allegations is tough to miss.

Second, Republicans are so desperate to make the case that Democrats are trying to weaponize government — even as Republicans themselves brazenly weaponize government to a degree without modern precedent — that they’re forced to concoct absurdities like these.

And third, this is a classic example of how the right manages to manufacture outrage out of nothing. “So here’s how the game works,” The New Republic’s Greg Sargent explained. “Right-wing propagandists dishonestly clip a Democrat’s comments to conjure up the impression of a dark plot to persecute supporters of Donald Trump. A bunch of them post on it with an algorithmic boost from Elon Musk. Soon the sheer noise itself vaults the story out of the right-wing ecosphere and into mainstream coverage, where the evenhanded airing of both sides’ ‘positions’ transforms it into a ‘controversy.’ Paydirt!”

As for whether Trump’s Justice Department, which already launched one failed effort to prosecute Slotkin, agrees that the senator “should be tried for what she did,” watch this space.

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Zelensky's statement to journalists follows Putin meeting with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff on Oct. 21.

When Donald Trump pardoned Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, earlier this year, an unavoidable controversy soon followed: It wasn’t long before the public learned that Velutini had not only hired a former member of the president’s legal defense team, but also that the pardon came on the heels of generous campaign contributions Velutini’s daughter made to Trump’s super PAC.

But as damaging as those details were, the latest reporting from The New York Times pushes the controversy to a new level.

The surface-level details were already widely known: Velutini, a billionaire banker, was facing felony bribery and other charges in the United States, but his Trump-aligned defense attorney helped negotiate an unusually lenient plea deal in August 2025. Velutini ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor campaign finance violation.

But that wasn’t quite enough. Velutini still hoped to wipe the slate clean altogether.

To that end, his lawyer — Christopher Kise, the former Florida solicitor general who was part of Trump’s personal legal defense team — tried to use his position to advocate on behalf of his client, and Velutini’s daughter donated $3.5 million to MAGA Inc., the super PAC the Republican president has said he controls.

But while these details are notable in their own right, the Times’ new reporting, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, adds new details related to Alina Habba Mildon, better known at the time as Alina Habba. From the article:

Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, while she was still serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

Mildon’s first day at Concord Partners was on Jan. 1, just a few months after the company was created. Weeks later, Trump pardoned Herrera, for reasons the president has never publicly explained or tried to defend.

For her part, Mildon, whose role on Team Trump has long been a point of contention, issued a statement via social media after the Times’ report was published, alleging that the article is part of plot hatched by “left wing media” to “distract” voters during an election season.

Mildon’s lengthy statement added, “Big Scoop: After leaving public service, I’ve gone back to doing what I have done for my entire career: being a lawyer. If the New York Times simply went back and looked at their own reporting, they have already credited another capable attorney for what he successfully did without me and took credit for.  Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the D.O.J. — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false and defamatory.”

It’s worth emphasizing, however, that according to the Times’ reporting, Mildon didn’t just begin work in private practice after parting ways with the administration: The article specifically noted that when she began working with Velutini’s daughter, Mildon was a senior adviser to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, and “had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals.”

The Times’ report added, “Ms. Herrera and Mr. Herrera did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did their companies. In a statement, the Justice Department said Ms. Habba did not speak to anyone about a pardon.”

Throughout the president’s second term, Trump has faced difficult questions about his scandalous pardons, efforts to secure pardons though lucrative lobbying campaigns, and allegations that pardons might effectively be for sale in this White House.

If the latest reporting is accurate, these questions are not only poised to get louder, they’re likely to be the subject of post-midterms congressional investigations if Democrats are in the majority in either chamber.

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True conservatives are realizing that Trump is using the Republican Party for his own convenience.

True conservatives are realizing that Trump is using the Republican Party for his own convenience.

Elon Musk ordered the speed cap on Starshield, the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink network that Ukraine’s drones rely on, The Wall Street Journal reported on 20 October. Earlier, Musk said that such limits are decided by the US military and “ultimately POTUS.” Speaking to reporters in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on 20 October, according to WSJ, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “We haven’t made any directives or anything like that,” CBS News reported.

For a week, no one with a hand on the system said the decision was theirs. Musk pointed to the US military and the president, and Trump said he did not know who it was. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said the cap has hampered the drones they use to intercept Russian Shaheds and to strike Russian forces in occupied territory. Kyiv says the cap remains in place, and at about 160 km/h it makes intercepting jet-powered drones and missiles that fly about twice as fast virtually impossible.

Musk spoke with administration officials, including Trump, before the cap, a source says

Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the network, people familiar with the matter told WSJ. The slowdown, which began on 14 October, left some of Ukraine’s strike and interceptor drones virtually useless, WSJ said.

WSJ’s sources differ on Trump’s role. Some US officials said Musk acted on his own and that Trump did not specifically order any retribution against Ukraine. One person said Musk spoke with several senior administration officials, Trump among them, before imposing the cap. Two people said Musk and Trump discussed the decision by phone soon after the slowdown became public.

During the uproar, SpaceX representatives called White House counterparts. They asked for a shared message that the company and the administration had coordinated before Musk’s directive, the people said. The White House ran an informal inquiry into who ordered the slowdown, WSJ said.

Musk held several conversations with administration officials before the order to understand the president’s thinking, CBS reported, citing sources. He dislikes his company being seen as profiting from the war, and it is unclear how his order was carried out, CBS said.

Musk pointed at the US military over Ukraine’s satellite limits. Now a US official says the administration had nothing to do with them

Hegseth points to Starlink’s terms of service

Hegseth said the US had not pulled anything back. He said Starlink “has the option” to make decisions under its terms of service, and that from the Pentagon’s view nothing had changed, CBS reported.

Speaking to reporters as he left the White House on 16 October, Trump said he did not think either he or Musk was responsible, The Telegraph reported. On 19 October, he said, “I don’t know who it was, but I’d like to find out.”

Last week, a bipartisan group of senators asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate whether officials “directed” or “authorized” changes to Starlink and Starshield services and intelligence sharing affecting Ukraine.

Earlier reports pointed at the White House

On 15 October, Reuters reported that the order came from inside the White House. The officials said Pentagon leaders received a message that the Starshield service for Ukraine’s military needed to be slowed, but did not say who made the decision or who carried it out. A senior US official said “No such request was ever made by the president.”

On 16 October, The Telegraph reported, citing four sources, that Musk approached Trump with the idea of the speed limits. One of the sources said Trump agreed.

Analysts and Kyiv say the cap is still in place

Michael Kofman, a war analyst at the Carnegie Endowment, said, according to WSJ, that Ukrainian strike and interceptor drones remain limited to 160 km/h. He said actual connections run below 130 km/h, which still hampers strikes and air defense.

On 20 October, Ukraine’s top diplomat in Washington, Denys Sienik, said Kyiv was still waiting for answers from the Pentagon and SpaceX, WSJ reported.

Inflation has outpaced wage gains for six months and counting. Gas prices have averaged over $4 per gallon for most of the past six months. It’s unlikely consumer prices will come down anytime soon — Congress is on the sidelines, and the president shows no signs of reversing course on his tariffs and the never-ending Iran war.

Under these bleak circumstances, you would think receiving cash with no strings attached from the federal government would be something people would welcome with open arms. But President Donald Trump has achieved something remarkable: He’s made free money toxic to many Americans.

Since early September, Trump has promised to issue a $5,000 “dividend” to every American adult if Republicans maintain control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections. He has repeated this pledge throughout his midterm rally blitz. Despite its eye-watering $1 trillion price tag and the fact that federal law bars election-related payouts, Trump hopes the promise will butter up frustrated voters.

“If the Republicans win, you will each have $5,000 in your pockets,” the president said at a Georgia campaign rally on Friday. He implored the audience to trust him: “I’ll do it, I always do it.”

Multiple polls demonstrate that most Americans aren’t buying Trump’s $5,000 dividend promises or don’t think it’s a good idea.

The $5,000 checks are just the largest of several freebies Trump has offered. Less than 24 hours later, he also announced $500 “refund” checks to Americans who receive health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, saying they were overcharged for their premiums. The White House estimated the checks will reach about 1 million Americans in 30 states.

Then, in early October, the Trump administration launched another one-time payment program: $90 for about 20 million seniors receiving medical coverage through Medicare. This initiative is funded by the questionable use of a $2 billion fund for improving Medicare.

I spoke to three people who have received Trump’s last-ditch payouts. Two of them received the Medicare payment, and the other received the Obamacare one. All described a feeling of disgust at what they called receiving a “bribe” for their votes.

On Oct. 8, Cynthia Heim, a former IT worker who lives just outside of Wilmington, Delaware, spotted a strange email in her inbox. It was Trump taking credit for the Medicare payment, similar to what he did during the first pandemic stimulus checks of 2020. She immediately deleted the email and cast it into the digital ether.

“Obviously, I was thinking this is trying to bribe people. It was just a weird timing of when he decided to send this out,” Heim told me. “I could think of more things that those $2 billion could have been used for.”

Heim has felt inflation chomp into her finances like many Americans. Her pension and monthly Social Security check don’t buy as many things as they used to. She’s still paying off a mortgage, and dining out is no longer an affordable luxury to splurge on. Cheap ramen is now a staple she regularly eats alongside her adult son, who lives with her.

“I have a 401k that I’ve already dipped into twice this year,” she said. “This past year is the worst that I have felt.”

Whether the president knows it or not, Trump is copying the playbook of populist governments with awful economic track records.

But despite the pressure, Heim didn’t want to use what she felt was tainted money. Instead, she donated all of it to the Democratic National Committee.

Alison Butler, a former economics professor residing in Washington, D.C., had a similar reaction when she noticed a $90 deposit in her bank account earlier this month.

“It doesn’t feel like money I am entitled to,” she told me. “And if I’m not entitled to it, I don’t want to keep it.”

Butler, another registered Democrat, split the money into two donations. One went to an initiative that delivers books to Washington prisons, and the other went to a mental health nonprofit that connects formerly incarcerated people with therapists.

Their reactions to the payouts are not terribly surprising, given the poor reception for the original “dividend” pitch. Multiple polls demonstrate that most Americans aren’t buying Trump’s $5,000 dividend promises or don’t think it’s a good idea. An NBC News poll published on Sunday showed that nearly half of self-identified Republicans don’t expect the payment.

What if the cash at stake wasn’t $90 but $2,000? That was the case for Tim Lilienthal, a Utah-based independent consultant and leadership coach. Earlier this month, he received a letter that touted Trump’s healthcare record, along with a paper check bearing the hefty sum.

“My wife and I were so disgusted by it, we didn’t cash it for a week,” Lilienthal said. “We just let it sit on our dining room table. Because I just was like, I don’t even want it. It felt like a bribe.”

For now, Republicans are saying little about the Medicare and Obamacare checks and focusing on limiting their probable losses in the midterms.

Lilienthal, a Republican who didn’t vote for Trump in the last election, lost his ACA subsidies when the GOP-held Congress failed to extend them. When all was said and done, his household’s monthly bill shot up from $1,475 to $2,623 — a 78% increase in premium costs for a family of four. Lilienthal’s 11-year old son helped him overcome the anguish about the check and put the $2,000 into 529 college savings plans.

Whether the president knows it or not, Trump is copying the playbook of populist governments with awful economic track records. It’s a simple tactic: Pull out all the stops to win votes now and worry about the cost later.

In 2018, ex-Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro dangled a reward for Venezuelans if they supported him in what was a presidential election later marred by fraud.

“You give, I give. I am thinking of giving a prize to the people of Venezuela who come out and vote,” he said at the time, linking a government handout in exchange for their vote.

In Argentina, politicians have used election-related giveaways to cobble together constituencies for decades. In Sept. 2023, then-Economic Minister Sergio Massa campaigned for the presidency and announced a financial relief package timed just before the election. The plan platita — or “pocket cash plan” — delivered a mix of subsidies, tax exemptions and $256 cash handouts to retirees, public-sector employees, self-employed workers and even professionals. Voters, though, ultimately handed control of Argentina’s government to Javier Milei, a slash-and-burn libertarian who pledged to tackle inflation no matter what.

American voters may well be inclined to reject the last-ditch handouts, too.

“As a voter, it shows desperation to me,” Butler said, calling the cash payment “dirty money” that she wanted nothing to do with. For now, Republicans are saying little about the Medicare and Obamacare checks and focusing on limiting their probable losses in the midterms.

“I hadn’t heard much on this from constituents,” Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, an occasional Trump critic who’s floating a 2028 presidential run, said in a text message.

“I’ve been more focused on the $5K promises and what’s going on in Ukraine at the moment,” Bacon said.

It’s hard to turn down free money, especially when prices keep scaling to new heights with little end in sight. In this case, it amounts to pocket change that falls far short in assembling a political coalition that will stem the bleeding for Republicans in the midterms — and they’re on the cusp of paying the price.

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Eight years ago, Republican candidates flailing to avoid a midterms wipeout in October 2018 seized on a ragtag group of Central Americans as a potential lifeline. GOP fearmongering filled the airwaves as the so-called migrant caravan made its way north. As recently as Monday, I was confident Republicans would not repeat what even then was clearly a desperate play, especially in 2026’s far different political climate.

How quickly I was proven wrong.

In the past few days, President Donald Trump, Republican candidates and right-wing commentators have all latched onto images of riots and chaos in France, and are once again using white nationalist talking points to stir panic, claiming that the unrest in Europe is a preview of America’s future under a Democratic congressional majority. This is a party that’s hamstrung by a historically unpopular president, sky-high fuel prices, troubling economic data points — and little else to run on. It’s also a bet that racist rhetoric could be a better motivator for a good portion of the GOP electorate than the economic pain that Trump has unleashed upon them.

It’s also a bet that racist rhetoric could be a better motivator for a good portion of the GOP electorate than the economic pain that Trump has unleashed upon them.

We don’t have room to dive into the actual motivations and dynamics at work in the protests that have overwhelmed France since last week. (The short version is that student protests over rising living costs and deteriorating schools spiraled into days of riots and looting.) But ahead of a Monday rally featuring Trump in Kansas, The Guardian reported, “giant TV screens played about 10 minutes of Fox News coverage of the unrest that has gripped Paris and other cities, which included commentary blaming the trouble on the French government’s immigration policies.”

“If you want to see what is at stake in this election, just look at what’s happening in France,” the president told the friendly crowd of Kansans, adding that the country has been “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists.” Trump went on to blame “globalist left-wing politicians” who “have treasonously imported millions and millions of third-world migrants who are totally incompatible with the West” for France’s plight.

The ugly rhetoric is nothing new for Trump, and at least partially fits in with the broader Republican focus on labeling all Democrats as communists. But online, things got even darker from a much broader array of figures, including Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller claiming the “Democrat agenda is the mass looting and pillaging of our civilization.” The White House itself was among the X accounts posting variations of the ominous phrase “import the third world, become the third world” on Monday.

Import the third world, become the third world. pic.twitter.com/VPEuZdeClW

— Turning Point USA (@TPUSA) October 19, 2026

Trump himself used the phrase in a Truth Social post in April, which the White House shared on X. His campaign also posted it on X in 2024, using a photo of Black and brown men in contrast with a picture of sunny suburban home. As with many of the themes and phrases the administration has adopted over the past year, this one has white nationalist origins. Ironically, the slogan itself is foreign-born, having been imported from Europe’s far right.

In These Times documented an early example in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where a small group of protesters displayed the slogan on a sign during a rally in November 2017. The handful of tiki torch-bearing white supremacists also chanted “you will not replace us,” the same phrase echoed on the University of Virginia’s campus earlier that year, the night before a white nationalist ran over a counterprotester in Charlottesville. (Trump infamously insisted there were “very fine people” on both sides of that incident, though his supporters continue to cling to the fiction that the resulting controversy was a “hoax.”)

A group called Identity Evropa took credit for that banner in Pennsylvania and many others. The Anti-Defamation League said in a report on the increased use of hate speech-laden banners that the slogans were “a sanitized version of the group’s true aim, the preservation of ‘white American identity’ and the promulgation of the idea that America was founded by white people for white people and was not intended to be a multiracial or multicultural society.” For the phrase “import the third world, become the third world” to have been adopted and laundered so thoroughly by the White House is a depressing marker for where this administration’s beliefs lie.

The GOP’s sweaty lurch to ultranationalism made at least slightly more sense in 2018. Politico, at the time, reported that Trump’s team had concluded that “border protection, safeguarding immigration officers and standing up to illegal immigration resonated with voters” in districts that were competitive in 2016. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from that September showed 42% of Americans approved of the president’s immigration policies. Likewise, Democratic strategists worried that “even the most draconian of Republican [immigration] policies” like family separation failed to turn off voters in states Trump won in 2016.

Whatever the reasoning, the recycled white nationalist rhetoric spewing out from the White House and other conservative figures is disgusting.

The push did less to blunt the GOP’s losses than a similar bid to politicize an Ebola outbreak ahead of the 2014 midterms, but it still dominated the final month before the election and left Democrats off-balance. In the aftermath of a year of anti-immigrant raids and mass deportations, the story is different. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from this week found only 36% of Americans approved of Trump’s immigration policies. Pew Research similarly found earlier this year that 52% of Americans think Trump is doing “too much” to deport immigrants.

With that in mind, the choice to go hard on France seems confounding, especially when you consider that going heavy on anti-immigration would likely backfire in many of the swing districts that Republicans would normally be hoping to flip. But as my colleague pointed out to me, this is likely a play to rile up the GOP’s base where motivation has been lacking. The apathy fueling the so-called red undertow effect has allowed Democrats to make plays for districts that just two years ago went for Trump by double digits.

Maybe the hope is to make conservatives who were likely to stay home in protest over the economic hardship Trump has caused more inclined to head to the ballot box. But whatever the reasoning, the recycled white nationalist rhetoric spewing out from the White House and other conservative figures is disgusting. I had thought that the GOP wouldn’t stoop so low during this time of desperation — and that’s on me.

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