The idea behind a federal anti-fraud task force is not inherently absurd. Independent estimates show billions of dollars are lost every year to fraud and abuse, and if officials have a credible idea about how to combat the problem, more power to them.

Seven months after the launch of the White House’s anti-fraud task force, however, the list of problems is not short.

From the outset, there was ample reason for skepticism. The effort, Donald Trump said, would be led by JD Vance, who was an unfortunate choice. Not only was the vice president unqualified for such a task, but the administration also made little effort to hide its partisan political motivations, which meant it was eager to target blue states.

What’s more, this is a delicate issue for the president, given his unfortunate record on committing fraud, benefiting from fraud and issuing pardons to those who have been convicted of fraud.

Making matters worse is the task force’s actual performance. Vance insists he and his team have uncovered more than $260 billion in fraud, but those claims have largely unraveled under scrutiny.

With this in mind, the White House is apparently trying a new tack: crowdsourcing.

Trump announces "fraud whistleblower incentive program" — "Americans will now be able to go to fraud dot gov and report cases of corruption and theft of taxpayer dollars in their communities … if you turn somebody in and you find $1 billion, we're giving a commission of 1%. That's a lot of money"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T18:18:02.278Z

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump and Vance announced a $25 million whistleblower program, to be administered by the Department of Justice, which is designed to offer cash rewards to those who uncover and report cases of fraud.

I suppose it’s possible that this will be an amazing success, and Americans will succeed in identifying the kind of systemic problems that the Republican administration has struggled to identify. (Trump specifically said at the Oval Office announcement, “People will make millions of dollars by turning others in.”)

But it’s probably best to keep expectations low.

First, the mechanism is a mess. People are supposed to submit tips to fraud.gov, with the promise of up to $30,000 to those who uncover cases that lead to criminal convictions or “significant federal enforcement” actions. What’s to stop scores of people from submitting baseless allegations, each of which investigators would be expected to review? Nothing. (I’ll be especially interested in seeing how many Americans report instances of alleged fraud involving Trump and his team.)

Second, the first recipient of a taxpayer-funded check is Nick Shirley, a right-wing YouTube influencer, who’s undeserving of such a reward, and whose payout reinforces concerns that this endeavor is little more than a political gambit.

Third, the White House staff doesn’t appear to have done its homework. The president said, under his plan, tipsters will be eligible for 1% of the cost of the disclosed fraud, prompting a reporter to remind him that under the False Claims Act, which has been on the books for more than 150 years, Americans are eligible to collect between 10% and 25%.

Fourth, given the way this administration has mistreated whistleblowers, it’s rather ironic to see the White House launch a whistleblower program like this one.

Finally, there’s Trump’s vision of his hands-on role in the program.

Trump lies his ass off about the economy: "We have more growth than this country has ever had. And we have more growth than any country in the world is having right now."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T18:40:15.035Z

“When you do these things, sometimes there’s a dispute about who turned them in, who didn’t turn them in and who is supposed to get what and when,” the president said. “So I am going to do something which I think people will like: I will be the arbitrator of all of these decisions. In other words, I’ll determine whether or not the person is deserving.”

In other words, the Justice Department is administering the program, but Trump expects to personally intervene, taking time from the day job he’s supposed to be doing, to adjudicate certain cases and approve payouts.

What could possibly go wrong?

The post White House’s new fraud whistleblower program suffers from some glaring flaws appeared first on MS NOW.

Sen. Roger Marshall’s re-election campaign is struggling for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest problems for the Kansas Republican is the recent reporting on how he treated patients who couldn’t afford their bills during his time in private practice.

That Donald Trump is trying to defend his loyal congressional ally is not surprising. What’s notable, however, is how the president is rallying to the senator’s defense.

At a campaign rally in Kansas, Trump acknowledged the controversy but said news organizations had been unfair to the senator, since Marshall was “mandated by law” to “go after those people.” That wasn’t even close to being true — there was no legal requirement for Marshall to garnish paychecks, seek arrest warrants or charge punitive interest rates — although the president didn’t stop there.

Trump says the press smeared Roger Marshall as "a shylock type guy"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T00:36:34.374Z

“They made it like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock-type guy,” the president said.

As NBC News reported, the word is widely recognized as “an antisemitic slur.”

In fairness, one might note that, in 2014, then-Vice Presiden Joe Biden used the same word, though the Delaware Democrat apologized shortly after.

Trump, in contrast, has publicly used the word more than once, and he has never apologized.

Making matters worse is the broader pattern, which makes it impossible to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Last year, for example, the Republican president declared that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker in the history of the U.S. Congress, is “not Jewish anymore” because the New York Democrat opposed the White House’s foreign policy agenda.

The inherent antisemitism was unavoidable. It’s not up to Trump to declare himself the arbiter of who the “real” Jews are based on his personal whims or any officials’ willingness to go along with his policies.

A year earlier, as the 2024 race neared its end, Trump publicly suggested that he intended to blame Jews, at least in part, if he lost. A month earlier, after seeing Gov. Josh Shapiro’s remarks at the Democratic National Convention, the former president decided to take a rhetorical shot at his critic. The Pennsylvania Democrat, Trump wrote online, is a “highly overrated Jewish Governor.” In context, there was no reason for the Republican to reference Shapiro’s faith. Trump did it anyway.

Months earlier, he similarly invoked the familiar “dual loyalty” trope by claiming that Jewish voters who support Democrats hate Israel.

All of this was offensive but familiar. During his 2016 campaign, the future president spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition and said, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians.” He added, “I’m a negotiator — like you folks.”

Several months later, in the run-up to Election Day 2016, the Republican promoted antisemitic imagery on social media. In the closing days of the campaign, Trump again faced accusations of antisemitism, claiming Hillary Clinton met “in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.”

During his first term, Trump continued to use highly provocative rhetoric about Jews and what he expected of their “loyalties.” In 2019, he spoke at the Israeli American Council’s national summit, where he suggested Jewish people are primarily focused on wealth, which is why he expected them to support his re-election campaign.

After his 2020 defeat, Trump kept this going, whining that Jewish voters “don’t love Israel enough,” dining with prominent antisemites at Mar-a-Lago, and arguing that Jews need to “get their act together” and “appreciate” Israel “before it is too late.”

In late 2022, he went so far as to declare that Jewish leaders “should be ashamed of themselves” over their “lack of loyalty.”

Trump occasionally expresses bewilderment over his lack of support among Jewish voters. Why he finds this confusing is a mystery.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Trump’s latest example of antisemitic rhetoric was hardly his first appeared first on MS NOW.

MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow described what she called the “presidential snowflake factor” that’s weighing down Republicans ahead of the midterms, as President Donald Trump continues to campaign for GOP candidates in red states while his party fights to hold onto Congress.

Maddow said Trump has spent his second term “pursuing things that make him feel good about himself” instead of focusing on policies that could give Republicans issues to tout to voters.

“You get all the vanity projects and him naming everything, and all the gold gewgaws everywhere that make him feel wealthy, all the pointless and feckless revenge investigations and attempted prosecutions of his perceived enemies,” she said. “It’s all stuff that’s designed to make him feel powerful and to feel good about himself.”

The “Rachel Maddow Show” host said Trump’s approval rating is “deep, deep, deep down in the political toilet” and argued that his preoccupation with praise has left little room for a strategy focused on actually helping Republicans in November.

“I think it’s obvious that he’s not going to pursue a midterm strategy that is based on propping up vulnerable Republican candidates other than himself,” she said.

Maddow said Trump had become such a “wuss” and a “snowflake” that he could only “bear hearing happy stories about himself.” She added, “He can only go to places where he gets adulation, and he only can stand ever hearing ‘Yes.’”

“He’s only going to go to places that still like him, and there are vanishingly few of those left,” she said.

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You can watch Maddow’s full comments in the clip above.

The post Rachel Maddow: Trump’s ‘presidential snowflake factor’ could leave GOP in the cold appeared first on MS NOW.

MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough blasted President Donald Trump for making false and misleading claims about Kansas Democratic Senate nominee Adam Hamilton at a rally for Republican Sen. Roger Marshall on Monday, asking how “stupid” the president thinks his supporters are.

Trump attacked Hamilton, the senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, the nation’s largest United Methodist congregation. He said Hamilton supports “flooding Kansas with unvetted refugees,” said the pastor “openly mocks Jesus” and accused him of using church money to fund “anti-religious transgender activities.”

“Everything you said there was a lie,” Scarborough said Tuesday on “Morning Joe,” after playing a clip of Trump’s remarks. A fact check by The Kansas City Star found that Hamilton does not support open borders and has said “dangerous criminals don’t belong here.” Hamilton also told ABC News earlier this month that he believes there are two genders while criticizing Trump for turning transgender people into a political target: “The president has taken a group of people that represent a very tiny minority of people who are bullied and picked on and harassed, and he’s tried to make them a campaign issue.”

Scarborough called it “deeply offensive” for Trump to attack “the pastor of the largest Methodist church in America, who preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

“If you listen to his sermons, that’s what he does, which is the antithesis of what Donald Trump does every day when he lies about people, when he’s angry, when he attacks other people — not for political differences, but just attacks them personally and spreads lies,” he added.

Trump also defended Marshall over a controversy involving his former OB-GYN practice. A review of Kansas court records by The New York Times found that the practice sued more than 700 former patients over unpaid bills, some as small as $101, and routinely were charged 18% annual interest. In 81 cases, patients were arrested after missing court dates.

The president said Marshall “was given a bum rap because he was mandated by law to request, strongly, money owed from patients.” But no law required doctors to sue patients over unpaid bills.

“Marshall wasn’t mandated to go after single mothers and have them thrown in jail,” Scarborough said, adding, “It’s just like, how stupid do you think your supporters are?”

Watch Scarborough’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.

The post ‘Everything you said there was a lie’: Joe Scarborough rips Trump’s Kansas rally appeared first on MS NOW.

Donald Trump’s first bailout for farmers came in 2018, at which point the president approved payments totaling $12 billion. A year later, the Republican administration kept going, announcing a bailout for farmers worth $16 billion.

Late last year, the president launched another $12 billion bailout for farmers, many of whom were harmed by the White House’s misguided and ill-fated trade tariffs policy, though the money proved insufficient. As my MS NOW colleague Hayes Brown summarized, the policy was little more than “duct tape on a broken pipe,” which did “little to fix the underlying problem.”

In June, Trump made it clear that he was eyeing a possible fourth bailout for the industry. And this week he followed through, announcing an $8 billion bailout during a campaign rally in Kansas, specifically aimed at helping farmers address higher diesel costs. The New York Times reported:

Under the plan, known as the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, the Agriculture Department will use a formula based on how many acres and which crops farmers planted to reimburse them for a “portion” of their losses. The money will come from the Commodity Credit Corporation, a financing institution that the Agriculture Department uses to fund crop insurance and natural disaster payment programs.

Payment rates will be announced next month, and farmers will receive money at a later date.

There’s ample reason to believe the $8 billion will be insufficient. But just as notably, at no point during Trump’s event did he mention that farmers were struggling with higher diesel costs because of the war with Iran that the president launched eight months ago.

Indeed, the one thing that all four of the bailouts have in common is that they’re effectively admissions of guilt: Trump’s agenda continues to hurt his own country’s agriculture industry, which in turn has necessitated a series of payouts.

As for the timing of the president’s latest announcement, it comes just two weeks before Election Day, with early voting underway in many states. It’s a safe bet that the bailout was intended to address intensifying discontent among voters in farming communities, who have long backed Republicans but don’t appear to have much to show for it. As MS NOW reported this week:

After two decades of defeats in rural America, Democrats are suddenly putting up a fight in farm country. The party is running competitive Senate races in Iowa, Kansas and other farm states, as well as House races in heavily rural districts that could help it regain control of Congress in January.

Credit (or blame, depending on your party) for this reversal of fortune lies with President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran, which have battered farmers and pushed the rural economy into crisis. The Department of Agriculture’s analysts expect farmers’ net incomes to decline by 5.5% this year, as costs rise and receipts fall. The National Agricultural Law Center’s tally of farm bankruptcies jumped 45% last year, and is on pace to rise another 11% in 2026.

Will Trump’s latest bailout affect voters’ attitudes, enough to stem the tide? We’ll find out in two weeks.

The post White House approves yet another bailout for farmers hurt by Trump’s agenda appeared first on MS NOW.

In hindsight, it seems like Donald Trump might not have fully thought through the consequences of his bizarre $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC, which continues to move forward in ways the presidential plaintiff doesn’t seem to like.

Attorneys for the British broadcaster, for example, recently subpoenaed former special counsel Jack Smith to testify.

“It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith, who spent years gathering evidence on those topics with the force of the Justice Department and the power of the grand jury behind him,” the BBC said in a court filing.

The president and his lawyers apparently don’t see it that way. The New Republic reported:

President Trump doesn’t want former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in a deposition as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Company.

The BBC has subpoenaed Smith to defend itself from Trump’s accusations that the network defamed him with deceptive editing in a 2024 documentary about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. In a court filing Friday, Trump’s lawyers tried to fight the subpoena by claiming that “Smith lacks any personal knowledge regarding the issues in this matter.”

In response, the BBC’s attorneys wrote, “No one forced Plaintiff to file this lawsuit and to dispute that his speech on January 6 incited the violence that followed at the Capitol. But as long as he chooses to maintain the case, he cannot commit the fundamental injustice of preventing the BBC from obtaining the evidence it needs to robustly defend itself on every element of his claim, including Plaintiff’s burden to prove falsity.”

To recap briefly, Trump sued the British broadcaster for $10 billion late last year over a news program that focused on the Jan. 6 attack. Defending the litigation, Trump told reporters that the network “literally put words in my mouth,” adding, “I guess they used AI. … They actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with Jan. 6 that I didn’t say.”

That wasn’t quite right. For one thing, the BBC didn’t use artificial intelligence. For another, the network did air a program that edited Trump’s Jan. 6 speech, connecting two clips delivered roughly 50 minutes apart; but the news outlet didn’t manufacture words or phrases out of whole cloth.

The editing nevertheless sparked a controversy that led to an internal investigation, and the BBC ultimately fired some senior officials and issued a written apology.

Trump, however, apparently didn’t want to settle for an apology. He wants $10 billion.

The case, however, has proven rather inconvenient for the Republican who filed it. BBC lawyers want to depose the president as part of the proceedings, but Trump has already backed out of a scheduled deposition and appears reluctant to answer questions about his own case.

As The New Republic report added, “His attorneys are also fighting attempts to … subpoena his children to testify and to dive into his finances.”

Now those same lawyers want to prevent the former special counsel, who has plenty to say about Trump’s Jan. 6 efforts, from answering related questions, further delaying the case that the president ostensibly wants to proceed.

The judge has scheduled a hearing for later this week to consider questions about the Smith deposition and discovery related to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago revenue, which would help shed light on whether the president has suffered damages as the result of the alleged defamation. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Why the BBC wants to talk to Jack Smith, and why Team Trump wants to block his testimony appeared first on MS NOW.

American consumers will pay dearly for this misguided decision.

The E15 policy is probably unfamiliar to many Americans, but in parts of the Midwest, especially Kansas, it’s a very big deal. Its importance is what made Donald Trump’s latest rhetoric so extraordinary.

To oversimplify matters a bit, the E15 policy refers to a biofuel blend made with 15% ethanol, which is sold to consumers as part of an effort to reduce prices at the pump. Under existing federal laws, E15 sales are limited to the summer driving season, though Kansans, especially in rural areas, would much prefer year-round E15 sales.

With this in mind, ahead of the president’s campaign rally in Kansas on Monday night, the White House boasted in a press statement, “President Trump approved year-round E15 sales, expanding markets for Kansas corn growers and giving drivers more affordable options at the pump.”

Hours later, Trump delivered remarks at his campaign event, which touched on the E15 policy — in an unexpected way.

Trump: "With Roger Marshall in the Senate, we will make year-round E15 permanent. But if Adam Hamilton is in, I'm not going it. That's it. I'm only doing it for him. That's a big deal for Kansas."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T01:17:16.134Z

“I also gave Kansas a waiver to sell E15 all year round, and with [incumbent Republican Sen.] Roger Marshall in the Senate, we will make year-round E15 permanent,” the president said. “But if [the Rep. Adam Hamilton, the Democratic nominee] is in, I’m not doing it. That’s it. I’m only doing it for him. That’s a big deal for Kansas, actually.”

I’m mindful that Trump’s transactional approach to campaign politics has become quite brazen of late. Over the weekend, for example, the president told a Kentucky audience that the administration would invest in a local economic revitalization project, but only if his preferred Senate candidate won.

Earlier this month, Trump similarly told an Ohio audience that he might look unfavorably at the state’s future emergency aid requests if they don’t elect a Republican governor.

At practically every rally, Trump similarly vows to send $5,000 checks to every American adult — at a cost of roughly $1.3 trillion — but only if the election results make him happy.

But his E15 comments in Kansas are arguably the most outrageous to date. There’s nothing about a Democratic-led Congress that would prevent Trump from extending his earlier waiver, but the president made the policy commitment conditional anyway, not because he had to, but because he chose to.

Trump effectively told Kansans he’s prepared to hurt their state on purpose if they vote in a way that displeases him. If there’s a defense or a precedent for such a presidential message, I can’t think of it.

The post Trump takes transactional politics to a new level at latest campaign rally appeared first on MS NOW.

The good news for Donald Trump is that he’s profiting to a breathtaking degree from the presidency. The bad news for the Republican is that Americans have noticed.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, for example, found that 66% of the public believes the president is using his office to enrich himself, up from 56% a year ago. A week earlier, The Associated Press released the results of its latest national poll, which similarly found that most Americans believe that Trump “is profiting off the presidency in unethical or illegal ways and is focused more on his wealth than helping people like them.”

Somehow, JD Vance has failed to notice what the American mainstream already understands.

On Saturday, CBS News aired a town hall event in Michigan where the vice president told host Tony Dokoupil, “I’ve not once seen evidence that Donald Trump has enriched himself.”

JD Vance: "I've not seen a single shred of evidence that Donald Trump participates or sanctions in that corruption … I've not once seen evidence that Donald Trump has enriched himself"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-18T00:43:28.833Z

Two days later, the Ohio Republican sat down with Mark Halperin, who interviewed the vice president for a media outlet called 2WAY, and Vance continued to toe the line.

“I think the president’s allowed to earn a living and allowed to live his life, and I don’t see, again, the question is, is he profiting off of his office,” Vance said. “I just don’t see any evidence that’s true.”

This suggests that the vice president is either remarkably unobservant or deliberately unobservant.

This doesn’t have to be complicated. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, including more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency-related income, according to his latest annual financial disclosure.

No other president in American history has ever seen such financial gains while in office, and as a recent analysis from The New York Times explained, “Mr. Trump’s profits are a haul once unimaginable for any leader of a liberal democracy, particularly a sitting American president. No modern Western leader has ever publicly disclosed such big windfalls while in office. The Trump family’s earnings, experts said, have moved him into an echelon of enrichment more associated with strongmen in Russia and Turkey.”

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut posted a related, seven-part response to Vance via Bluesky, highlighting a variety of other ways Trump has profited off his office, including lucrative stock trades.

“Listen man, we get it,” the senator concluded in a message directed at the vice president. “If you work for Trump, you agree to lie and let your boss steal from taxpayers. But NO ONE believes you.”

The post As Trump profits off the presidency, JD Vance is surprisingly unobservant appeared first on MS NOW.

Donald Trump has probably been briefed by his political team on the ongoing gender gap in American politics. In the latest Pew Research Center poll, for example, the president’s approval rating among men was 33%, but among women it was down to 26%. The same survey found that in the midterm elections, Democrats and Republicans were tied among men, but women plan to vote Democratic — by a 14-point margin.

With just two weeks remaining in the midterm election cycle, the White House took a modest step toward addressing this problem, though the move was not without flaw.

On Monday morning, the president signed an executive order creating a Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health, which will apparently work alongside a new White House Women’s Health Task Force. According to Trump, the idea was pushed by his wife, first lady Melania Trump, who delivered rare public remarks to the kickoff event.

“Beginning today, we will change the reality of women’s health,” she said. “Previous generations fought for women’s rights. Our generation will fight to discover the cures that will ensure a woman can live her life in health and to the fullest.”

On the surface, the initiative seems entirely worthwhile, but a closer look reveals some notable points of concern.

The leadership: The White House’s task force will be co-chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is wildly unqualified for such a role, and whose disengagement from governing reinforces impressions that this initiative is largely for show.

The resources: While the objective behind the initiative has merit, what’s needed are real investments in scientific research, and Trump’s executive order neither allocated any funds nor included any funding goals.

The redundancy: The idea of creating an office at the NIH specifically focused on women’s health sounds great, but Team Trump didn’t come up with the idea: The NIH has had an Office of Research on Women’s Health for 36 years.

A Washington Post report added, “Trump’s initiative resembles past administrations’ activities. Then-first lady Jill Biden pursued similar efforts to jump-start women’s health research, and Biden officials in November 2023 launched their own White House effort intended to coordinate a cross-government response to boost women’s health.”

The record: It’s good to see the Republican administration take women’s health research seriously, but this appears to be a relatively new priority. As The New York Times reported, it was just last year when Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, under Kennedy’s leadership, tried to “slash funding for the Women’s Health Initiative, a long-running, taxpayer-funded study of a broad range of women’s health issues that began in the 1990s.”

The rollout: While the president had a seemingly straightforward objective when announcing the initiative, he predictably strayed from his prepared text and started talking about, among other things, how impressed he was with his renovation decisions, the replacement of the White House Rose Garden, the cushions he had “specially made” for White House patio seats and his concerns related to damage to women’s shoes.

Under the circumstances, it’s probably best to keep expectations low as the White House’s efforts on this issue get underway.

The post The problem(s) with the White House’s new women’s health initiative appeared first on MS NOW.

Guilfoyle is small potatoes.

Between Oct. 11 and Oct. 18, 2026, President Trump faced widespread criticism following several controversial decisions, including the appointment of a press secretary, a proposal for televised executions, a modified Russia sanction deal, and the release of an AI-generated video involving a tiger.

President Donald Trump has a lot of reasons to be upset in the final stretch before the midterm elections: voters angry at rising prices, reasonable predictions that the GOP will lose the House — and maybe the Senate — and a stagnant war in Iran.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not on the list of things making voters angry — and yet over the past week, he has been catching strays from a frustrated Trump. Because Trump is incapable of blaming himself for anything, including Republicans’ current political predicament, Trump and his misguided sense of victimhood are once again targeting Ukraine.

After the United States launched a war against Iran in late February, energy prices surged worldwide. Americans have grudgingly shelled out more at gas stations and the price of diesel has hit farmers particularly hard. Trump announced earlier this month that he’d struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. to bring down prices.

Experts say this is a bum deal for the U.S, as it gives several billion dollars to Moscow to continue its war against Kyiv and is unlikely to affect global fuel prices. The diesel Russia would send is still needed by, well, Russians, which would keep demand — and prices — high. Zelenskyy rightly criticized the Trump-Putin diesel deal, which prompted Trump to lash out at him for Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He blamed Kyiv’s attacks for the high price of diesel.

“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal, because he could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does,” Trump told reporters on Oct. 10. He added, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.” The next day, he announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” — but both countries quickly denied it. Zelenskyy, much to Trump’s ire, soon resumed retaliatory attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure. (Moscow had bombarded the Ukrainian electrical grid for months.)

The Trump administration has since taken several worrying actions that seem intent on punishing Ukraine, and Zelenskyy specifically, for a problem of Trump’s making.

Ukraine’s access to Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade satellite internet service, was interrupted last week. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said any decision to shut off service came from the U.S. government, not his company. Reuters reported that the order came from inside the White House, though the administration pointedly denied that the president made the decision.

On Friday, Trump delayed implementation of a new round of sanctions against Russia. The executive order pausing the sanctions said this was “in the national interests of the United States,” but as of Monday evening, the White House had yet to clarify exactly how. Much like the Starshield disruption, the executive order prompted bipartisan outrage, but Trump has given no signal that he’s wavering.

All of the above is bad, but much more troubling is that none of it makes strategic sense to anyone but Trump, who has long demonstrated a willingness to use Ukraine as a political punching bag. Indeed, for the past decade, Trump has shown an outsized level of enmity toward Kyiv during periods of personal political stress.

Not long after the 2016 election swept Trump into the White House, the U.S. intelligence community determined that Russia had attempted to influence American voters in a wide-ranging operation. Investigations into Trump’s potential ties to that plot frustrated him to no end, leading him to embrace a conspiracy theory shifting the blame to Ukraine. In this debunked narrative, Ukraine framed Russia for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email server and took one of the breached servers to hide the evidence.

This belief factored into the president’s first big scheme to rig the 2020 election on his own behalf. Trump had billions of dollars in military aid held back from Ukraine to try to force the newly elected Zelenskyy to find the supposed missing server and launch a bogus corruption investigation into Joe Biden, then the former vice president, and his son. The scandal led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even after Ukraine’s bravery and resilience in the face of Russia’s aggression, Trump still sees Zelenskyy and his country as targets for his bullying

Since his return to the White House, Trump’s relationship with Zelenskyy has at times been lukewarm but has more often been frigid. Vice President JD Vance helped publicly berate Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last year. That was a lowlight in what was already a fraught dynamic. Meanwhile, Trump continues to slam Zelenskyy for refusing to make a deal with its invader Russia, but Putin is the greatest impediment to peace.

Even after Ukraine’s bravery and resilience in the face of Russia’s aggression, Trump still sees Zelenskyy and his country as targets for his bullying. He’s dropped more than 10 years of misplaced anger on the shoulders of a country struggling to survive an attempted imperial conquest.

But for all of Trump’s efforts to shift blame for his own ineptitude onto a country fighting for survival more than 5,000 miles away, very few Americans seem to be buying his spin. In hopes of improving his own domestic standing, Trump is once again exacerbating Ukrainian hardship and strife. It doesn’t seem to be working this time, either.

The post Trump wants to make Zelenskyy his midterms scapegoat appeared first on MS NOW.

“I am thoroughly unamused right now,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said to Justice Department lawyers on Oct. 12. “I do not know how I could have made it any plainer.”

She was referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to bulldoze — both metaphorically and literally — its way toward remaking a public golf course in Washington, D.C. The story may seem relatively inconsequential — a single patch of land. But it shows just how much contempt Donald Trump and those in his employ have for the idea that rules or laws ought to apply to them.

For months, the administration has been planning to demolish much of East Potomac Golf Links and replace it with a course more to Trump’s liking. After a preservationist group and two golfers sued to block the plan earlier this year, Reyes told the government that they had to give advance notice before any substantial work was done on the site. Yet over the long holiday weekend, workers cut down more than 400 trees in the park. In a lame attempt at complying with her instructions, the government’s lawyers sent an email at 4:55 p.m. on the Friday before the holiday weekend mentioning that trees were going to be cut down.

As any lawyer will testify, judges really don’t like it when lawyers lie to them, attempt to deceive them or defy their orders. Yet that is what lawyers working for the Trump administration have done in case after case.

Reyes was furious. When a Justice Department attorney said the administration’s lawyers “did our best” to update her on work at the course, Reyes replied, “No, you did not do your best. You did your absolute worst.” After scolding the government’s lawyers, Reyes issued an injunction halting work on the site for two weeks. In response, the government demanded that she recuse herself from the case, saying she was biased against them. She denied their request.

Undeterred, on Sunday, Trump said on Truth Social that “Restoration work will begin…on November 15th, when the old Course will be closed to play.” On early Monday morning, he posted again about the subject, saying, “The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane?” He added that “The experts at ‘Interior’ are allowed to do this First Class renovation ‘as of right.’ They do not need an approval. Work is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY!”

At another hearing, hours after the president’s post, the government tried to claim that the tree removal wasn’t actually about preparing for Trump’s new golf course at all, but was about enacting a maintenance plan the government wrote in 2019. Reyes was incredulous at that assertion. “There is no universe in which all of this just coincidentally happens at the same time,” she said. “There just isn’t.”

As any lawyer will testify, judges really don’t like it when lawyers lie to them, attempt to deceive them or defy their orders. Yet that is what lawyers working for the Trump administration have done in case after case. An analysis by Just Security located 34 cases in which judges expressed their concern that the administration was not complying with legal orders, and another 90 cases in which judges said they could not trust what administration lawyers told them. That excludes immigration cases, where abuses have been far worse. The researchers found at least 740 immigration cases in which the administration failed to comply with legal orders. And, it should be noted, this analysis only went through March of this year.

Merely restoring legal professionalism at the DOJ will be insufficient. Wholesale firings must be just the start.

All that misconduct has occurred at a time when the Trump administration has completely discarded the principle — which had held since Watergate — that the Department of Justice should be independent of the president, making its decisions on prosecutions and law enforcement based on the law, not the preferences and grudges of the person in the Oval Office. This DOJ, on the other hand — led by Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche — investigates and prosecutes Trump’s critics like James Comey and Rep. Ilhan Omar, while Blanche campaigns for Republicans like just another political hack.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s deeply misguided ruling in Trump v. U.S., it may be impossible to hold the president accountable for the deep corruption he has brought to the DOJ. But the officials who have carried out his attack on the rule of law have no such immunity. So when Democrats take full control of government — perhaps after the 2028 election — merely restoring legal professionalism at the DOJ will be insufficient. Wholesale firings must be just the start. There must also be investigations by Congress and sanctions against anyone who violated ethical standards. Those who participated in abuses must be punished just like any wrongdoer.

Since lawyers are licensed at the state level, that is where much of the action will take place. There must be consequences for anyone who engaged in misconduct — up to and including disbarment. It has happened in the recent past: Some of the most unethical lawyers who helped Trump try to overthrow the results of the 2020 election were disbarred in various states for their misdeeds, most notably Rudy Giuliani.

As law professor and legal ethics expert James Schultz wrote last year, “Baseless claims of election fraud, retaliatory lawsuits against the press and prosecutions advanced on tenuous grounds all stand as textbook violations” of legal ethics rules. As a consequence, “State boards should go after the attorneys who are enabling Trump’s behavior.” And that should be just the beginning.

The post How Trump’s golf course renovation turned into an attack on the rule of law appeared first on MS NOW.

Top Republicans have stopped spending in a politically daunting North Carolina Senate race, but President Donald Trump is standing by his handpicked nominee, Michael Whatley, with a Tuesday visit he is hoping can turn out GOP voters.

The North Carolina trip, part of a seven-day, seven-state midterm blitz by the president comes as current MS NOW/FiftyPlusOne polling has the state’s former governor Roy Cooper leading Whatley by 10 points. Despite Whatley’s uphill battle, the president is standing by him, hoping to ignite Republicans with early voting now underway.

That support from the president, however, comes as the top Senate Republican super PAC paused future spending in North Carolina earlier this month and slashed ad spending, indicating a lack of confidence in the race.

The Senate Leadership Fund cut $13.2 million in ad spending on the North Carolina Senate race on Oct. 2, according to AdImpact, and “other smaller cuts have trickled in since,” totaling $14.6 million in cuts. That same day, Trump told reporters on the White House South Lawn that he hoped Whatley wins, but was “worried” about him. The North Carolina cut was accompanied by a seven-figure Republican ad buy in historically red Kansas.

Trump’s decision to stand by Whatley and campaign with him in the final midterm stretch despite the current state of the race and his party’s pullback is putting the president’s own political strength on the line.

The president, and his political team, do not believe North Carolina is entirely out of reach, but the trip is also designed to mitigate the scale of a loss, according to one current and one former White House official who are familiar with Trump’s midterm strategy.

“At the very least, you don’t want to handpick a guy in a swing state and then not work to help him,” said the current White House official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal midterm election strategy, as were others for this story. The official continued that for “reputation sake” it was advantageous for Trump to campaign for Whatley.

“The issue is turnout. [Trump’s team] feels like he can draw low-propensity voters out, which makes Whatley more competitive,” the former official said.

“No one can dispute the fact that President Trump has created one of the most robust coalitions in political history with the MAGA movement, and the president understands how to communicate with them,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said. “President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress,” Ingle added.

Even as Republicans face a tough political landscape this fall with elevated inflation and the ongoing war with Iran, the president insists that his October rallies are turning the tide by energizing the party. But his ability to turn out the vote is being tested.

According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, 33% of American adults approve of the president, while 66% disapprove. According to the poll, Trump’s approval on the economy is at 28%.

“President Trump is barnstorming the country to tout Republicans’ historic wins and rally with voters who want Michael Whatley and [House candidate] Laurie Buckhout cutting taxes, slashing violent crime and putting North Carolina first,” said Republican National Committee spokesperson Emma Hall. “Unfortunately for the Democrats, they are stuck defending soft-on-crime hack Roy Cooper and do-nothing [Rep.] Don Davis,” she said.

Cooper, a well-known two-term governor of the state, has homed in on affordability messaging and made a central campaign promise to “make stuff cost less.”

Whatley has tried to catch up. His initial campaign messaging focused heavily on reducing crime and increasing public safety but has shifted in recent days with his own sharpened focus on affordability.

North Carolina is also home to one of Republicans’ more perilous redistricting gambits this cycle. The state’s GOP-led legislature last year targeted moderate Democrat Don Davis by reshaping his seat to make it more winnable, and friendly, to conservatives. To do that, Republicans made the nearby 3rd District, held by GOP congressman Greg Murphy, better for Democrats while still being decidedly Trump-friendly.

Despite the redraw meant to help Republicans keep control of the House and oust Davis, the incumbent is in a competitive position to potentially win re-election. And Murphy’s seat, where Trump’s Greenville rally is expected to be held, now has signs of vulnerability for the GOP.

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Sen. Roger Marshall is a great man, a great senator and “one of the finest people in government,” according to President Donald Trump. But the Kansas Republican failed to score Trump’s new favorite endorsement at a rally Monday night: a compliment about his looks.

For weeks, Trump has been promoting embattled Republican candidates not for their policies, but for their supposed handsomeness. The focus on physical attributes isn’t entirely out of the ordinary for Trump — he owned the Miss Universe beauty pageant for nearly two decades — but his recent pattern of complimenting male candidates’ appearances is a unique midterm campaign strategy.

At a rally in Kentucky on Saturday, Trump described sizing up Ohio Sen. Jon Husted.

“I never did that with a man before,” Trump said. “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline. Studied him. He’s got a jawline.”

Trump has made it clear he believes his comments are benefiting GOP candidates, even as polls show widespread discontent with Republicans’ handling of high prices and the ongoing war with Iran. He claimed, without citing a source, that Husted had “picked up like 9 or 10 points” in the polls following his compliments.

He made the comments at a rally for House candidate Ed Gallrein, the “beautiful” former Navy SEAL who defeated Rep. Thomas Massie in a May Republican primary.

“I looked at him, walked through the door of the Oval Office. I said, ‘That guy is central casting,’” Trump said of the 68-year-old Gallrein.

Trump has given men this kind of praise before, including former Vice President Mike Pence, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But lately, the compliments have come more often and more effusively.

At a Republican rally in Dalton, Georgia, on Friday, Trump said Rick Jackson, the party’s candidate for governor, isn’t just “very handsome.” He’s a “distinguished, beautiful-looking guy.” Rep. Mike Collins, the GOP Senate nominee, is not only “central casting” but “a good-looking man.”

“And he’s all man,” Trump added.

Trump’s focus on men’s looks — and, by extension, their masculinity — touches on a larger question in this year’s midterms: Which party is the party of real men?

Democrats have been fighting on that terrain too. Several of the party’s Senate candidates have taken part in debates over modern masculinity, often using the vocabulary of online discussions about it. They include Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Sen. Jon Ossoff (Collins’ opponent in Georgia) and James Talarico in Texas.

El-Sayed has accused his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, of having “beta energy.” Talarico has pushed back on claims from Texas Republicans that he is “low T,” short for low testosterone. Official Democratic Party social media accounts have posted thirst-trap-style edits of Ossoff and El-Sayed that play up the candidates’ youth, energy and, of course, their looks.

Both parties’ interest in male attractiveness comes as polls show Republicans have lost their edge with young men, most of whom backed Trump in 2024. Some young men seem to share Trump’s fascination with the male form. This is the same group that pushed “looksmaxxing,” an online obsession with optimizing one’s face, to the top of social media feeds earlier this year.

It’s unclear whether Trump is deliberately courting fans of looksmaxxing influencers like Clavicular (Braden Peters), but it is clear that Marshall isn’t the only Republican to fall short of the president’s endorsement of his aesthetics.

Speaking in Dallas last month, Trump said that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent in the Senate race, “may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m sorry, Ken,” Trump apologized, before encouraging the attendees to cast their vote for Paxton, central casting or not.

The post ‘He’s got a jawline’: In the midterm fight over masculinity, Trump keeps grading men on their looks appeared first on MS NOW.

Republican lawmakers are frustrated that President Donald Trump has paused new sanctions on Russia’s economy, all but ignoring a measure he signed into law just a month ago.

What’s less clear is what exactly they plan to do about it.

Trump paused the sanctions by executive order Friday, and the backlash grew as lawmakers questioned why Ukraine’s access to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service was disrupted.

Few Republicans have been as forceful, or as specific, as Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who vowed Monday that Congress would punish the administration. He spoke to MS NOW after joining a bipartisan call between lawmakers and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“There have not been sufficient answers forthcoming from the administration,” Fitzpatrick said Monday. “And you better well damn believe that we’re going to demand them. We’re going to demand accountability. And these are not just words; they’re not just hearings. We’re going to take budgetary action — punitive budgetary action — until we get to the truth, until this is fixed.”

Fitzpatrick said the administration wouldn’t get a pass on the satellite disruptions, either. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Saturday that the U.S. government had nothing to do with the problems affecting Starlink, SpaceX’s commercial service, and that Ukraine did not have access to Starshield, the company’s military-controlled counterpart. Democratic lawmakers have sought more information on whether the disruption originated with the U.S. government or with SpaceX.

“It’s not enough to say you had nothing to do with it,” Fitzpatrick said. “You need to tell us who did, right? So if he’s saying he had nothing to do with it, he’s the president. He can find out who did.”

Rubio also said that, to his knowledge, Starlink was working. But Zelenskyy told a bipartisan group of lawmakers on a video call Monday that the service remains degraded, according to a joint statement from Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C. Zelenskyy “also reported disruptions to U.S. intelligence sharing concerning early warning of Russian ballistic missile launches,” the senators said.

“This is wildly unacceptable, and it’s not going to stand,” Fitzpatrick said. “There’s going to be consequences to this. And by the way, it’s not just Starshield. It’s the diesel deal. It’s the lifting of sanctions. It’s all of this stuff.”

Making good on those threats will require help from other lawmakers. An opening for “punitive budgetary action” could come during the lame-duck session, when Congress faces a Dec. 11 government funding deadline and aims to pass the annual defense authorization bill. But no specific plan has taken shape.

Other Republicans have objected to both the sanctions pause and the Starlink disruptions, but few have threatened consequences.

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that “there needs to be an investigation” by Congress into Starlink disruptions. But he stopped short of threatening to hold up the rest of Trump’s legislative agenda during the lame-duck session, saying there was no need for brinksmanship.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., a member of Senate Republican leadership, told reporters Monday that she disagreed with the decision to waive the sanctions. Lawmakers had “waited for a while” to set the sanctions deadline at a time Trump preferred, she said, only for him to ignore the law.

“We had timed this to when the president and the White House felt it was a good time to move forward with this so the work could be effective,” Capito said. “That’s why I think I was extremely surprised when he did it.”

But Capito didn’t commit to any specific response. Asked about a possible investigation into the Starlink disruptions, she cited Rubio’s assertion that the problems had been resolved and said the relevant information would “all come out.”

Pressed on whether Congress should take further action on the sanctions, she pointed to the upcoming election.

“It’s going to be difficult to say anything in the next two weeks that’s going to make any kind of difference,” she said.

Rep. Craig Goldman, R-Texas, also disagreed with the waiver but said he would defer to the president.

“I personally am not for that, but, you know, he’s in discussions at a much higher level than I am,” Goldman told reporters. “But no, I certainly would be in favor of keeping those sanctions on Russia until the war is over.”

Asked whether any committees should investigate the Starlink disruption, Goldman said, “Oh, I’m not going to tell any chairman how to run the committee.”

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., criticized Trump’s decision at a discussion hosted by the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on Monday, but she didn’t call for Congress to act.

“I want to see us use the economic firepower that we have,” Britt said. “I want to see that peace through strength. I believe that Russia is at the weakest point that they have been in this war. I believe we are at that moment where, if we are able to utilize those tools, we can drive Putin to the table, driving him to the table, ending this war.”

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, led a delegation of lawmakers to meet with Zelenskyy in Ukraine last week. In a statement Sunday, he said Zelenskyy would be willing to halt strikes on Russian petroleum infrastructure in exchange for U.S. targeting assistance to counter Russian missiles.

Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., pointed out that her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, negotiated the sanctions bill before his death in July. She said she wanted the sanctions to stay in place and planned to talk to Trump when he visits South Carolina on the campaign trail.

“The president and I share the same goal, which is to end the war, get gas and diesel prices down, and the sanctions bill is one of the tools he can use to do that,” Graham told reporters on Saturday. “It’s up to him whether or not he chooses to use it.”

The post ‘Wildly unacceptable’: Trump’s moves on Russia are testing GOP patience appeared first on MS NOW.

"We are maintaining all contacts that can help bring peace," Zelensky said upon arrival.

In a planning document released last month, the National Park Service conceded that the “triumphal arch” that President Donald Trump is desperate to build would cause “adverse effects” to nearby historic properties and monuments if construction advances as planned.

But, the administration added, the wildly unnecessary and legally dubious project is moving forward anyway.

A week later, the campaign to build one of the president’s many vanity projects took a rather farcical turn when Trump said, in apparent seriousness, that he planned to convert the 250-foot project into a “top grade military complex” to house drones. In case that wasn’t quite laughable enough, the Republican — who claimed to be acting in response to a “strong request” from unnamed Armed Forces personnel — added that the arch would also feature snipers on the roof, along with “large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, whose congressional district includes the area in question, called the president’s latest argument “stupid” and “idiotic,” adding, “Trump clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security.”

And therein lay the point. When Trump was worried about the litigation surrounding the White House ballroom vanity project, he shifted his rhetorical focus to pretend the project had a national security component. It wasn’t the case, but someone apparently explained to him that federal courts have traditionally given presidents wide latitude to pursue national security priorities, giving him the apparent idea of trying to pull the same trick twice.

At least, that was the plan. The Washington Post reported:

The Trump administration on Friday released final plans for President Donald Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch that do not include drones, snipers or other features of the “military complex” that Trump said he would add to the project.

The National Capital Planning Commission, a federal panel that reviews major construction projects, posted new renderings and accompanying documents provided by the Interior Department, which is overseeing the controversial project. None of the new documents mentions a military purpose for the arch, with officials instead offering information on planned tourist visits and other ceremonial functions.

So, is that it? If the final plan excludes the absurd “military complex” elements, is it safe to say that even the Trump administration has moved on from this nonsense?

Alas, no. The White House told the Post that Trump’s plans hadn’t changed, and information related to a national security component for the arch may yet be released at a later date.

Whether that’s true is unclear, although in the meantime, a group of U.S. military veterans is moving forward with legal efforts to prevent work on the project from getting started in earnest. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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In January 2017, with only a couple of days remaining in Barack Obama’s presidency, the Democrat held a White House press conference in which he explained his vision of occasional political intervention.

“There’s a difference,” the outgoing president explained, “between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake.”

In other words, Obama was sending a signal to the public: If people were looking to him to condemn everything Donald Trump did on a near-daily basis, they were likely to be disappointed. Once in a great while, however, the former president might feel the need to step up and defend fundamental American principles.

Obama has largely kept that pledge, steering clear of the day-to-day political arena, but over the weekend, he made the latest in a series of exceptions. MS NOW reported:

Former President Barack Obama issued a rare statement Sunday rebuking the Trump administration for targeting the president’s political enemies, namely for launching a federal investigation into Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

“It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say,” Obama said in a lengthy statement shared on social media. “But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.”

Obama’s online statement went on to characterize the Republican administration’s crusade against Omar as “appalling.” He added, “The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.

“In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.

“The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.”

Or put another way, Team Trump’s radical offensive against the congresswoman represents a clear example in which “our core values may be at stake.”

There’s overwhelming evidence to bolster the former president’s case.

Federal investigators, acting at Trump’s behest and ignoring the 60-day “blackout period” before the election, seized the laptop, cellphone and passport of a sitting member of Congress as part of an apparent campaign to strip Omar of her citizenship and ultimately deport her in response to evidence that does not appear to exist.

Throughout history, there have been countless clashes between presidents and members of Congress, but there is no modern precedent for an incumbent chief executive trying to misuse the levers of federal power in the hopes of kicking a sitting elected lawmaker out of the country.

The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg added in her latest column, “This is more than just another persecution of one of Trump’s political enemies. Rather, his government is tacitly declaring the citizenship of all foreign-born people provisional, their Americanness something that can be revoked. It’s a frontal attack on the idea of constitutional equality. As Hannah Arendt wrote — a quote that the writer John Ganz reminded me of — ‘One is almost tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments use their sovereign right of denationalization.’”

Hours after Goldberg’s column ran, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared on conservative media outlet Real America’s Voice and said the Republican administration is considering a possible “RICO case” against Omar, referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which has traditionally been used against organized crime figures.

For what it’s worth, The Washington Post reported last week that in 2019, Team Trump also ordered an investigation into Omar’s immigration records, though the “investigation was eventually abandoned” for lack of evidence.

Seven years later, the sequel to this abuse is ongoing — and significantly worse.

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