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If you don’t live in Ohio, you’ve probably been blissfully free from thinking about Vivek Ramaswamy since the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which he left after arousing the visceral dislike of pretty much all of his rivals, as well as many voters.

Ramaswamy, who’s now running for Ohio governor, is back in the national spotlight this week, once again in extremely unflattering fashion, because of a campaign ad targeting the Democratic candidate Amy Acton. Acton, a first-time candidate, has leaned heavily on her inspiring biography: She has spoken about experiencing homelessness as well as being raped by her stepfather as a child; she later waited tables and delivered newspapers to put herself through medical school, eventually becoming the director of the Ohio Department of Health.

Most recent polls have shown Acton with a small advantage over Ramaswamy, which may be why his campaign resorted to the appalling commercial. The spot features Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, accusing her of being an inveterate liar. “She’s lied her entire life,” Arthur says. “My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”

The ad immediately drew both outrage and debunkings. “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 said in a statement. National Review, the conservative magazine, pointed out that court documents provide extensive backup for Acton’s claims, as does contemporary press coverage. She was removed from her mother’s custody at the time; her mother’s husband, Cledith Arthur, whom she accused, left the state after being indicted for sexual assault. He pleaded not guilty and died in 2004.

For a campaign to cast doubt on a rival’s account of childhood sexual abuse is shocking; to do so despite such evidence is despicable. For years, influential MAGA figures insisted that a conspiracy of pedophiles was running the government and other influential institutions. Now some of them treat pedophilia as no big deal. The Trump administration has tried to downplay the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sexual predator who was at one time a close friend of the president’s and maintained ties to other administration officials as well. Ramaswamy is opting to dismiss allegations of pedophilia and use them to smear an opponent. At an event earlier this year, he said that Acton has no vision “other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”

Despite his previous willingness to mock Acton’s abuse, Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t initially claim the ad. It first became public on Monday via the colorful Buckeye State political blogger D. J. Byrnes, known as the Rooster. The version he posted, received from a tipster, didn’t feature any explanation of who had paid for it. But Ramaswamy has since gone all-in. “It is an ad from our campaign,” Ramaswamy said at an event last night. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. And unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.” Axios reports that Ramaswamy (who recently loaned his own campaign $5 million) will spend $4 million airing it. “This is a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton,” his campaign manager, Jonathan Ewing, said. “The people who know her best keep warning Ohioans about her.”

This is bold, if not wise: The ad has generated widespread condemnation. Even some right-wing influencers who initially spread it, such as Jackie Chea, have had second thoughts: “I have no idea if Amy’s abuse allegations are true, but if they are, then her mother is the monster … I regret framing the post as if Amy was lying about her mother when I can’t be sure about that.” Another, Dan Bostic, wrote, “I’ve never in my life seen someone do something so stupid. It’s hard to even wrap my brain around how someone could possess such horrible political instinct.” (Laura Loomer continues to endorse it, which is telling in its own way. Vice President Vance, meanwhile, was “disgusted”—but by Republican doubters, not by the commercial. He suggested that anything is justified in the name of winning elections. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” he said in Cincinnati today, telling his “fellow elected Republicans” to “stop whining about an advertisement.”)

On the other side of the aisle, liberals see the ad as suicidal. “I am very confident that this ad will backfire and blow up in Ramaswamy’s face,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former aide to Barack Obama, wrote. Any predictions now are premature: Knowing how convincing the ad will be, compared with the backlash, is impossible.

But the ad is another example of how Ramaswamy’s obnoxious personality has turned a race that should have been a safe GOP win into a toss-up. The candidate’s favorability rating is deeply negative. His fellow Republicans continue to dislike him. The outgoing governor, Mike DeWine, whose occasional pangs of conscience make him a profile in near-courage, clearly dreaded endorsing his fellow Republican. And although the national environment is friendly to Democratic candidates this year, no Democrat has won a governor’s race in Ohio since 2006; Donald Trump won the state three times. Acton is a first-time candidate most famous for her association with COVID public-health measures, neither of which is an obvious asset. If Ramaswamy loses, there will be no question about who was responsible.

Related:

• The 2026 midterms must-watch list
• Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth (From 2023)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• The Texas race worth watching
• Canadian officers don’t want to serve in the U.S. anymore.
• Why Trump is furious at Ukraine
• David Frum: The bill for Trumpism comes due.

Today’s News

1. Russia released Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American who had been imprisoned for more than four years on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine. The State Department said that the charges were fabricated, and President Trump said today that Russia had agreed to release Hubbard without receiving anything in return.
2. The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s request to enforce a policy restricting gender-affirming care for transgender federal inmates. The decision leaves in place a lower-court order blocking restrictions on hormone treatments, gender-transition surgeries, and other accommodations.
3. A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state, one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a tech company, after a jury found that it had committed 43 million violations of the state’s consumer-protection law by misleading users about data privacy in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Evening Read

The Data-Center Rebellion Is Just Beginning

By Paris Marx

Restrictions on data-center development have been part of the conversation in certain parts of the world since the late 2010s. Singapore and the Dutch municipalities of Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer both issued moratoriums on new projects in 2019, and by 2021, Ireland had introduced bans in certain areas because energy demands were outstripping supply. Some of these moratoriums were later lifted after stricter rules came into place, and over fear of missing out on the investment pouring into AI. Even still, these efforts have only grown since the data-center boom that was spurred by the dash to win the generative-AI race.

In recent weeks, Denmark downgraded data centers to the lowest priority for grid connections, and Thailand placed a pause on further data-center construction—suspending 49 projects where shovels had already broken ground. These moves demonstrate the tension that many governments are facing: trying to balance a desire to push the adoption of generative AI with the reality that the public is not on board with the massive data centers needed to power them.

Read the full article.

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• The contradictions of Troy Jackson
• The David Frum Show: Will tech oligarchs turn on Trump?

Culture Break

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Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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You might imagine that, given the imminent midterm elections, a spluttering war in Iran, and his sinking personal approval, Donald Trump has enough to worry about. Not so. The president has been posting prolifically on Truth Social over the past two days about protests in France. “The migrants have taken over France. They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!” he wrote this morning. Trump’s reactions don’t tell us a great deal about the protests or about French society, but they do reveal three things about Trump.

First, Trump’s favorite mode is punditry. Even as the world’s most powerful man, he frequently seems to prefer watching TV and shooting opinions from the hip to engaging in governance. This explains why he continued to give freewheeling briefings, full of his own speculation and medical advice, while the coronavirus swept the United States in 2020, and it might be one reason he’s fixated on France at a time of political peril for his own party.

Second, and related, Trump can’t resist meddling in other countries’ affairs, engaging in behavior that previous presidents would have concluded was inappropriate. The U.S. government has long worked to covertly influence foreign elections, and in some cases encouraged or fomented coups. But presidents have mostly avoided issuing public endorsements or other interventions in partisan politics overseas, two things Trump loves to do. He endorsed the prime minister of Japan for reelection, backed a right-wing candidate for president of Poland, placed tariffs on Brazil for prosecuting his ally Jair Bolsonaro, and lent his administration’s credibility to the reelection campaign of Hungary’s then-President Viktor Orbán. (Orbán lost.) This weekend, he endorsed embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s blaming of immigrants in France amplifies the platform of National Rally, a far-right party with fascist roots that is ideologically aligned with MAGA and has its best shot yet at capturing the French presidency for the first time next spring.

But U.S. interference abroad tends to produce some pushback. Leaders and voters in sovereign countries may not like a superpower telling them how to live—especially in a nation such as France, which still sees itself as a global player. Apologists might contend that Trump’s meddling in foreign politics is a sign of strength, projecting American power worldwide, but the brush-off Trump received when begging for international assistance in the Persian Gulf showed the cost of treating allies dismissively. Trump’s approach to the protests is notable because for years, he seemed to get along with French President Emmanuel Macron better than with almost any other foreign leader, a bromance sealed with history’s most awkward handshake. Their friendship seems to have cooled more recently, in part because of tariffs and Trump’s antagonism toward Ukraine. (Notably, the Kremlin is also using France’s protests to score political points.)

Third, Trump views all forms of protest—at least those with which he disagrees—as inherently illegitimate. The violence in France warrants concern: This past weekend, the country saw some of its worst riots in decades; shops were looted and landmarks were destroyed as rioters seemed to take advantage of the mass marches. But in his posts on Truth Social, the president does not simply condemn the violence—he suggests that the riots must be the work of foreign seditionists. The protest movement was in fact sparked by domestic concerns, particularly demands for better funding for the nation’s school system. Macron, in contrast to Trump, has said that many protestors have legitimate demands, even as he has fiercely condemned violence, which he blames on “troublemakers from far-left fringe groups.”

Authoritarians see any popular resistance as a danger to their power, which is why the autocratic Russian regime and the aspiring strongman Trump are united in condemning French demonstrations. And as nationalists, they must also blame the danger on outsiders, even though French authorities have not made any link between immigrants and unrest. “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion,” Vice President Vance posted on X this weekend, along with a clip of the city hall in Limoges, in the old province of Limousin, burning. “They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn’t listen.” This was not only a missed opportunity for Vance to blame literal limousine liberals for the riots; it was patently absurd. The French don’t need outsiders to teach them how to rage in the streets. They’ve been doing it for centuries. (Trump, an aficionado of Les Misérables, might not have made this mistake.) To the extent that migrants are involved in these protests, it is proof that they have assimilated fully to the French way of life.

Suggesting that Trump and Vance might be wiser to focus on getting their own house in order than to look overseas would be easy, but it misses the point. This weekend, while Trump was posting about French protests, Americans were participating in thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations around the country and Trump’s “border czar” was insinuating that Ilhan Omar, a Democratic lawmaker who is a naturalized citizen, committed immigration fraud. Trump’s attempts to delegitimize protest and whip up xenophobia aren’t ultimately about France. They’re about the United States.

Related:

• Why Trump turned to the sewer (From 2025)
• The violence sweeping France was never really about schools.

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• Leo J. Wise: How corruption got this bad
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• Maine has changed. Susan Collins hasn’t.
• Jonathan Chait: Mamdani is the centrist we’ve been waiting for.

Today’s News

1. The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other accused September 11 plotters who are seeking to reinstate a 2024 plea deal that would have given them life sentences. The three men are scheduled to stand trial before a military commission in 2028 and could face the death penalty.
2. Yesterday, President Trump defended his decision to ease sanctions and tariffs on Russia, saying the move was intended to keep Moscow at the negotiating table for a peace agreement with Ukraine. He also suggested that the talks included negotiations over the release of a hostage, but he did not identify anyone involved.
3. Houthi forces launched three ballistic missiles at a military camp in Yemen’s Shabwa province, killing at least 47 people and injuring at least 53 others, according to Yemeni military officials. The attack comes amid renewed fighting between the Iran-backed group and Yemeni government forces supported by Saudi Arabia.

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Evening Read

The Minimal Requirements for a Society Free From Fear

By Adam Kirsch

In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events. Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination. According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society. With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited. Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.

Read the full article.

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• Siding with Putin is a huge mistake.
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Culture Break

Read. Sarah Anderson’s latest novel accomplishes what Yesteryear couldn’t, Stephanie Hayes writes. In the corporate satire Fallow, a woman is hired to bear children for executives, and her experience skewers the ideal of “having it all.”

Explore. This may be the golden age of sex toys, Sarah Hepola writes. But relying on the convenience of self-pleasure may also be keeping us “cocooned in a little pod of self-gratification.”

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year. The fact that officials tried twice to kill her is somewhat more unusual, but not without precedent.

Consider the case of Margaret Dickson, a Scottish woman of the early 1700s. Estranged from her husband, Dickson took up work as a domestic in the town of Kelso, where she conceived a child out of wedlock but hid the pregnancy for fear of being shunned. She testified that she’d disposed of the baby after it was stillborn, but the body was found, and she was arrested. Under Scottish law at the time, concealment of a pregnancy was considered evidence of intent to commit infanticide. Dickson was convicted and sentenced to hang in Edinburgh in 1724.

Following what was then the practice, Dickson’s execution was public. She was hanged; her body was placed in a coffin and carted away for burial (by some accounts following a tussle with body snatchers who hoped to procure the corpse for dissection by medical students). Along the way, the burial party stopped for a beer, at which point noise was heard from inside the coffin. The lid was pried off, and Dickson was found alive, though confused. Dickson’s survival became an object of fascination and Dickson herself a sort of folk hero, the historian Mikki Brock, the author of a forthcoming book about Dickson, told me. Authorities in Edinburgh initially sought to rehang her, but they were never able to marshal enough support to do so. Dickson, who came to be nicknamed “Half-Hangit Maggie” (that is, half-hanged), lived into the 1750s.

Or take Joseph Samuel, a criminal who was sent from England to a penal colony in Australia. Once there, he was implicated in the murder of a police officer investigating a robbery. Samuel was convicted and sentenced to hang in September 1803, also publicly. It didn’t go well. On the first try, the rope around Samuel’s neck snapped. On the second, the noose unraveled. By then, the crowd was growing restive; a hasty third attempt also ended with a broken rope. Observers at the scene concluded that the mishaps were a sign from God that Samuel should not be killed, and the governor apparently concurred, commuting Samuel’s sentence to life imprisonment. (Three years later, Samuel disappeared at sea during an escape attempt with other convicts and was presumed drowned; perhaps God’s view was not as clear as it seemed at the gallows.)

A third celebrated case was that of John “Babbacombe” Lee, who was convicted of the 1884 murder of his employer and sentenced to die. (By that point, executions in Britain had moved out of the public and into prison yards.) Just like Samuel, Lee was spared by malfunctioning equipment: A trapdoor under the gallows, meant to release the condemned and snap his neck, had been tested, yet it failed three times to open. Lee’s sentence was commuted to life by the British home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, who said, “It would shock the feelings of anyone if a man had twice to pay the pangs of imminent death.” Lee was eventually paroled in 1907. Now infamous as “the man they couldn’t hang,” he wrote an autobiography and was the subject of a 1912 silent film, but he then faded from the historical record. He appears to have died in the 1940s, perhaps in Milwaukee.

When I first heard the stories of Half-Hangit Maggie and Babbacombe Lee as a child, I knew they were historical, but they seemed to belong more to the realm of myth or fairy tale. Hangings, mysterious mechanical failures, assertions of divine intervention—all of these seemed like things out of fiction. It was easy to chuckle at quaint details, such as the apocryphal tale that Dickson was required to remarry her husband because she’d been declared dead. And though I’d read about the beheadings of Charles I and Louis XVI, the specter of public execution felt distant enough from modern civilization to be faintly unreal.

Now all of these things seem much less remote. Until President Trump reversed course yesterday, the Defense Department planned to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who massacred comrades at Fort Hood in 2009. Pike’s fate is up in the air after her twice-failed execution. Pike, who was convicted of a brutal murder in 1995, has returned from a hospital to prison. The state official who oversaw capital punishment has resigned, and the governor has temporarily paused all executions in Tennessee. Her lawyers have requested that her sentence be commuted to life in prison.

The doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdale writes in The Dispatch that U.S. history offers a grim precedent. In 1946, a 16-year-old boy confessed to killing his employer and was sentenced to die via electrocution. A first attempt failed, and his lawyers sought to block a second. The Supreme Court ruled against them, and he was killed that year. But Dugdale argues that this precedent should not apply here. “From Pike’s markedly swollen and chemically burned arms, to her profound cognitive impairment (the severity of which remains unknown), the state has already inflicted a cruel and unusual punishment on Christa,” she writes. Setting aside the law, “as a matter of sheer ethics, if the state has vowed not to punish prisoners cruelly but has inadvertently done so, the state ought not attempt the same method of execution again.” (In this year’s other botched Tennessee case, Tony Carruthers’s failed execution left him partially paralyzed. He received a one-year reprieve, and advocates have called for his sentence to be commuted.)

The historical cases of the men and women they couldn’t hang feel much closer to the present day than they once did. And although some of the visceral details still sound like the stuff of myth, the pragmatic and humane outcomes of these situations stand out more against the backdrop of the recent news. Support for the death penalty has dropped since the 1990s, barely topping 50 percent today. Views are closely correlated with religion—white Protestants are far more likely to back it than any other group, according to polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. For religious supporters of capital punishment, the idea that a failed execution is a sign from above might not be so far-fetched. Among the nonreligious, many people may flatter themselves to believe that contemporary society possesses greater reason and logic than our forebears. Just as we try to understand our ancestors by how they handled cases such as those of Dickson, Samuel, and Lee, future generations will judge our society by its actions.

Related:

• A terrible way to die, a terrifying way to survive
• The real harm of a public execution

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• Jonathan Chait: Five fabulous days of Katie Zacharia
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• How Pete Hegseth’s plan for a reality-TV execution imploded
• Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels.

Today’s News

1. President Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired after less than a week in the role, according to three people familiar with the matter. Her dismissal followed criticism of her first press briefing on Tuesday and questions about her legal credentials.
2. Three children and a teacher were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, yesterday. Police said that a bystander pursued the 16-year-old shooter into the school and fatally shot him; another child and a teacher were critically injured.
3. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donated $1 million to support Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan. El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could determine control of the Senate in November.

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• Over/Under: Gamblers are more likely to lose money than make it—yet they keep coming back, Will Gottsegen writes. In the first edition of Over/Under, he explores why bettors return to casinos and prediction apps even when it’s not in their financial interest.
• The Books Briefing: Don’t listen to the romantasy haters, Talya Zax writes. The best-selling genre is more than just smut.

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Evening Read

Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity

By Bernie Sanders

Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species? As absurd as these questions may sound, and as obvious as the answers may seem, the Big Tech oligarchs funding the artificial-intelligence revolution have responded in ways that should alarm all of us.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wrote in 2017 that AI would allow humans to become “the first species ever to design our own descendants.” What this means for humans, however, remains unclear. According to Altman, we will either jump-start digital intelligence “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” In other words, humans have a choice: face extinction or merge with machines. “I believe the merge has already started,” Altman added, and is “probably our best-case scenario.”

Read the full article.

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PS

A great folk hero needs a good nickname, which is why Billy the Kid and “Pretty Boy” Floyd endure. Babbacombe Lee—the name comes from the site of the murder—belongs to that tier. I first encountered it on the strange, entrancing cover of an album, a 1971 “folk-rock opera” by the English band Fairport Convention. I wouldn’t rank “Babbacombe” Lee as prime Fairport, but it’s an entertaining listen. As for Half-Hangit Maggie, anyone visiting the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, the site of her execution, can have a pint at her namesake pub, Maggie Dickson’s. Just don’t expect it to produce any miraculous resuscitations.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump is the quantum president: simultaneously all-powerful and also a wee, innocent figurehead, blithely unaware of what his aides are doing.

The first Trump, the one who declares that he “alone can fix it,” was in the Oval Office last week, asserting his unfettered power to persecute his political opponents. “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” he said. “I can do whatever I want, if I want.” But after federal law enforcement conducted a search at the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, yesterday morning, Trump insisted he was completely uninvolved.

Without more information, the search—conducted by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE that handles complicated probes—is deeply troubling. The Trump administration has deployed a series of probes, searches, and indictments, many of which are plainly pretextual or political, against outspoken critics. (This is a crucial distinction from an August 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago, which yielded many boxes of highly sensitive material, haphazardly stored.) Black women, including Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, have been particular but not exclusive targets. The search also breaks a norm against public action in highly political cases in the 60 days before an election. Attempts to intimidate or criminalize an opposition party are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

There is much about the search that we do not know, including what evidence was used to obtain the warrant (though The New York Times reports it “was the subject of significant back and forth between prosecutors and the federal judge who eventually approved it”); what agents might have found; and what charges, if any, the government might be contemplating. Some reporting states that prosecutors are exploring whether Omar’s late father lied or made omissions on immigration applications. (The administration has focused on trying to strip citizenship from people who gave false responses on applications.) The congresswoman came to the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen at 17.

To hear Trump tell it, he also knows little about the probe. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said yesterday. “I have nothing to do with it.” (The Department of Justice told the Times that the search was part of an ongoing investigation but declined to comment further.) This is a pattern I previously identified: When faced with difficult questions or strong pushback, the president tends to insist that the lawyers are in charge and he’s not apprised of what’s going on.

But his claim is hard to believe. Trump has repeatedly said that he has a “right” to direct federal prosecutors to investigate whomever he wishes, and although he generally insists that he has not done so, evidence suggests otherwise. Last September, Trump posted on Truth Social instructing then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against critics, including James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote. Several news outlets later reported that the missive was intended as a private message. Bondi was removed this spring, reportedly because of Trump’s frustration that his attempts at retribution were moving too slowly.

In February, FBI agents searched an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, in pursuit of evidence for Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. (Their warrant was largely based on debunked claims.) The following day, Trump spoke directly to some of the agents involved, an extraordinary intervention.

Comey was ultimately charged with threatening the president, after he posted a photograph of shells he found on a beach that read 86 47, a set of numbers that supporters have said connotes wanting to remove Trump from office. DOJ has insisted the post was a threat of violence (which Comey has denied). Documents released by Comey’s lawyers this summer show that Trump was closely involved in the case, demanding briefings and notes from interviews with Comey prior to his indictment.

Adding to the impression that the Omar case is a White House effort, Katie Miller, the former Trump aide and the wife of Stephen Miller, posted about the story on X yesterday, saying, “Promise made, promise kept.” She later deleted the post.

But even if Trump is not personally engaged, he has made clear through his statements that he wants Omar investigated and punished. In 2019, he suggested that members of the progressive “Squad,” which included Omar, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few days later, after he criticized Omar at a rally, he watched as a crowd chanted, “Send her back!” In December, he called Omar “garbage” and said that Somalis should leave the U.S.: “Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.” The next month, when Omar was attacked at an event, Trump accused her of setting it up. This March, Vice President Vance told an interviewer, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” The message from the White House is clear enough to make King Henry II blush.

If Trump is as engaged in prosecutions of his political opponents as public evidence indicates, then his behavior is inappropriate and damaging to the rule of law. If, however, he truly knows nothing about what’s going on, then he’s not the heroic, powerful leader he claims to be. Which would he prefer the public conclude?

Related:

• Trump is hiding behind his lawyers.
• Trump shrugs off the Ilhan Omar attack.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Kimberly Guilfoyle was so close to getting it right.

The Trump hanger-on—former fiancée to Don Jr. and the current ambassador to Greece—was exchanging messages with a man named Eric Deters, according to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story last night. Deters, a right-wing podcast host, failed political candidate, and suspended lawyer in Kentucky, wanted help in clearing up some tax issues, and also wanted the Trump administration to extradite a doctor whose alleged fraud victims he was advising in a legal case. Guilfoyle, the messages indicate, wanted money—in one instance, a $100,000 wire—and she wanted it untraceable.

Guilfoyle was right to worry about secrecy. She was about to begin confirmation hearings for her ambassadorship, and understood the pay-to-play could hurt her. Yet neither she nor Deters could stop breaking the Stringer Bell rule by recording their skullduggery in writing.

“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” Guilfoyle wrote. “Please.” And in another: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” Yet even as she laid these instructions out, she kept haranguing Deters for indiscretion. “I really wish you would stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal,” she wrote, referring to the encrypted messaging app. In one message, she wrote, “If you write an email or a text about, l’m gonna kill you cause I love you but you’re so out of control.” Unfortunately for Guilfoyle, her Signal messages were not as safe a space as she might have wished. (The Journal does not reveal how it viewed the messages. Guilfoyle’s lawyer broadly disputed their authenticity to the paper but offered no details.)

Somehow, this is not the only Trump scandal with Balkan ties in the news this week. The New York Times reported that James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are ostensibly President Trump’s top political advisers, traveled—during an intense midterm campaign in which Republicans appear to be on the verge of serious setbacks—to advise a candidate in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s self-governing Serbian entity.

Both of these stories show the way that many people in Trump’s orbit view their positions not as public service but as a profit center. There’s a long and often depressing pattern of former officials capitalizing on government and political work, but Trump’s aides aren’t even willing to wait until they take their leave to start taking. Forget a team of rivals. Trump world is a team of mercenaries, in some cases literally.

Jared Kushner, who was a senior adviser in his first presidency and is married to his daughter Ivanka, continues to work as an envoy for Trump while pursuing business deals around the world. As Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker in September, Kushner’s record as a diplomat is underwhelming, yet his financial gains have been enormous. “He represents a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth,” Filkins wrote. Kushner and Ivanka Trump even have their own Balkan boondoggle, an attempt to develop an island in Albania that has run into legal and political difficulties.

Earlier this year, the Times reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick helped negotiate access to Kazakh tungsten reserves for an American mining company, and the federal government provided $1.6 billion in financing. Lutnick’s sons and Trump’s sons are both involved with companies that stand to profit from the deal (though representatives for them have said that they did not play a role in the deal). A Washington Post investigation this summer noted that Trump’s sons have invested heavily in defense-technology companies; the companies have scored “at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” (Company representatives told the Post that they secured their business without assistance from Trump’s sons.)

Where do any of these people get the idea that this is appropriate or that they can get away with it? From the president himself, naturally. Trump has moved on from small-scale grifts such as charging the Secret Service exorbitant fees to stay in his hotels during his first term to far more ambitious and lucrative schemes such as crypto ventures; even conservative estimates put his gains during this term alone in the billions.

Though Trump doesn’t have ethical scruples, he does have a sense of right and wrong: It’s right for him to profiteer, but wrong for others to make too much money from his name. That’s where Blair, LaCivita, and Guilfoyle may run into trouble. Politico reports that Republicans’ “knives are now fully out” for the two consultants. Trump himself weighed in on Truth Social, saying he was unaware of their clients but adding that he “will, on reflection, ask them and, if there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!” Firing them just before the midterms seems risky, as it might just create more chaos for Republicans, but they could make for good scapegoats after the fact. Trump has not spoken publicly about the Guilfoyle story, although Vice President Vance said he didn’t “love that.” In a further embarrassment, the article emerged while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visiting Athens.

Perhaps inevitably, Guilfoyle’s relationship with Deters ended acrimoniously. “I have paid you $300,000 over the years,” he wrote her in 2025, adding, in an amusingly self-negating flourish, “As of this memo, I have not received one favor. I am not naive or a sucker.” She was not happy, either. “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing,” she told him at one point, per the Journal. Her warning may have been too late.

Related:

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• Kathy Hochul’s improbable turnaround
• How the polls could be wrong again

Today’s News

1. U.S. prosecutors charged Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiring to torture Americans and other prisoners in Venezuela to suppress opposition and maintain power. The new charge has been added to the federal case against the couple, who are scheduled for trial in June 2027.
2. At least 30 people were killed in a Russian strike on a bus in eastern Ukraine, a day after another Russian strike killed 22 people in an apartment building. The attacks come as Russia intensifies its use of drones, missiles, and guided bombs against Ukrainian targets.
3. Hurricane Isaias strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season as it approached the Gulf Coast, and landfall is expected as soon as tomorrow. It could reach Category 3 strength, prompting hurricane watches and mandatory evacuations in parts of Florida.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1987, two writers predicted a path to energy independence from the Middle East. What they didn’t anticipate was what the U.S. would do to get there, Rafaela Jinich writes.
• Video Village: David Sims lists the decade’s 10 most defining movies (so far).
• Work in Progress: Rogé Karma explains the biggest source of inequality that no one talks about.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Forgive the Bad Texters

By Julie Beck

Whenever I receive a text, this is what happens. I pick up my phone. So far, so good. I experience whatever emotion the message elicits—the pleasant warmth of being reached out to, possibly the annoyance of being interrupted. Then, if conditions are right, if I’m not too busy or in the middle of talking with someone else, if my mind is at peace, if my anxiety is at no more than a low hum, if Mercury is not in retrograde, I will respond right then and there. If conditions are not right, it will be as though the text never existed at all.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Take a look. An ambitious retrospective examines the life and work of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner—to brilliant effect, Sebastian Smee writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The Democratic Party needs Abdul El-Sayed, but it doesn’t necessarily love him. Although few top Democrats have expressed public misgivings about El-Sayed, the leftist candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan who defeated an establishment candidate in an August primary, most of them aren’t overflowing with enthusiasm either. This hesitation is one reason yesterday’s news that former President Obama will campaign with El-Sayed and other Michigan Democrats later this month is notable.

Seeing why El-Sayed would want Obama’s imprimatur is easy: He’s by far the most popular politician in America, and he won Michigan in both of his presidential races—once by more than 16 percentage points and another by nearly 10, over a native Michigander. (More unexpected is El-Sayed’s welcome for Kamala Harris, who is unpopular with leftists, lost Michigan in 2024, and has gotten a stiff arm from some Democratic candidates this cycle.)

Obama’s incentives are more interesting. He is in an awkward phase of his career—no longer young enough to be cool but still too young to be an elder statesman. Nonetheless, with Bill Clinton and Joe Biden both aging and somewhat tarnished, no other figure can match Obama’s stature. He has become, as Politico put it today, the Democratic Party’s “closer-in-chief.” In that role, he’s been more willing to back left-wing candidates than other establishment figures have.

Last year, many high-profile Democrats were wary of the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani—either because they were skeptical of his policy stances or because of their long-standing ties to the family of his leading opponent, Andrew Cuomo. But Obama privately called him, praised his campaign, and offered to be a “sounding board” should Mamdani want advice. (Obama did not formally endorse Mamdani, though The New York Times, which first reported the call, noted that he prefers not to intervene in municipal races.) And in 2018, Obama endorsed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for U.S. House. He did so only after she’d won a primary in a safe district, so the outcome was a foregone conclusion, but given her anti-establishment campaign, he seemed to be sending a message—or placing a bet on future success. (Obama also privately called El-Sayed after his primary victory.)

Obama’s engagement with leftist candidates stands in contrast with most of his statements on leftist politics. Ideologically, Obama’s stances remain essentially center-left—even as the party overall has shifted leftward since he departed the White House—and he has at times appeared to scold or at least push back on the party’s left wing. Since leaving office, he has criticized cancel culture, slogans such as “Defund the police,” and what he views as a culture of ideological purity. Some critics on the left have been happy to return fire, labeling him a fake progressive who is too cozy with the powerful.

Notwithstanding his overall popularity, Obama has drawn grumbling from other parts of the party, too. Some critics complain that he spends too much time jetting around the globe, hobnobbing with NBA stars, and podcasting with Bruce Springsteen. Even his year-end playlists and reading lists feel a bit stale. (Obama bristled when the comedian Hasan Minhaj questioned whether he really made them.) In good times, this would be merely cringe; in a time of rising authoritarianism, some view him not being more actively involved in politics as a dereliction of duty.

Obama tends to lock in for campaign season, and he is a consummate party man; if the Democrats need to win the Michigan Senate seat, Obama will hit the stump for the nominee, whoever that might be. But Obama may have other reasons to embrace candidates such as El-Sayed and Mamdani. The politician who once described himself as a “skinny kid with a funny name” may see some of the same in them—or, in El-Sayed’s case, a swole kid. He is not a Muslim, as they are, but he was a target of Islamophobic attacks. And he is not a leftist, like them, but he was often tarred as a radical socialist.

Beyond the personal, Obama has signaled some impatience with more traditional elements of the Democratic Party during appearances in the past two years, echoing the boisterous left more than the buttoned-up establishment. He has criticized what he sees as faintheartedness from Democrats who he said last year were “cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from just asserting what they believe, or at least what they said they believe.” In sidestepping internecine battles, he has also suggested agnosticism about methods as long as the results are good. “There’s been, I gather, some argument between the left of the party and people who are promoting the quote-unquote abundance agenda. Listen, those things are not contradictory. You want to deliver for people and make their lives better? You got to figure out how to do it,” he said.

Obama will never have the same policy slate as Senator Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani do, but his rhetoric and backing of leftist candidates suggest that he’s more attuned to shifts in the Democratic Party than his establishment peers are, and less rigid than his leftist critics contend. In 2008, Obama promised change; in 2026, he is still willing to give it a shot.

Related:

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Today’s News

1. Cornell’s faculty introduced a no-confidence resolution over the university’s handling of an alleged 2024 sexual assault at a fraternity house. The faculty senate is expected to consider the measure on October 14 amid calls for changes to how the university addresses sexual assault.
2. Paramount completed its $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, creating a new media giant called Skydance. The combined company brings HBO, CNN, CBS, Paramount, and their major film and streaming franchises under one owner.
3. Student-led protests in France over poor school conditions spread to more than 40 cities, drawing roughly 256,000 people, including teachers, parents, and unions. The government suspended classes for two days as the movement grew, and some protests ended in clashes with police.

Evening Read

Churches Are Finally Making the Moral Case Against Sports Betting

By McKay Coppins

One of the puzzling things about the online sports-betting boom that has swept through American culture over the past decade is the relative slowness of religious leaders to articulate a moral case against the vice.

In the past, churches were among the leading voices warning against gambling. Jerry Falwell denounced it as a sinful habit that preyed on the poor and left “little children” to pay the price. In The Atlantic’s December 1907 issue, a Unitarian minister made the case against “speculation.” “The long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling,” Charles F. Dole wrote. “It is a dangerous or unsocial form of excitement; it hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels, tempts men to self-destruction.”

But in recent years, as state legislatures have raced to legalize sports betting and gambling ads have flooded the airwaves and millions of young men have begun walking around with a casino in their pocket, spiritual leaders have been relatively muted.

Read the full article.

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Explore. Fishermen have always exaggerated the size of their catches. But AI has taken the practice to a different level, Tyler Austin Harper writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Heading into yesterday’s first round of presidential voting in Brazil, the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was thought to be a narrow favorite. When the results came in, though, Lula was behind his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, 45 percent to 47 percent. The two men will compete in an October 25 runoff to determine the winner.

Those surnames will likely be recognizable even to casual watchers of global elections: Lula, a leftist, has been the dominant force in Brazilian politics this century, and was president from 2003 to 2011. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair, was a right-wing president from 2019 to 2023 but was defeated by Lula in a comeback bid; Bolsonaro the elder then attempted a Trumpian autogolpe to stay in power but failed and was later convicted and sentenced to prison for it.

Now it’s Lula who’s struggling with voters. He was hurt by crime concerns as well as a corruption scandal, but he’s also a very familiar figure to Brazilians—perhaps too familiar. “Brazil wants change and I am very happy with the results,” Bolsonaro fils said last night. What kind of change, though?

When Donald Trump completed his own presidential comeback in the 2024 U.S. election, one common explanation was that a fundamental change had occurred in American politics, realigning demographics, parties, and policy for the long run. (As I have written recently, that claim looks shaky today.) A competing narrative, especially popular among comparative scholars, focused on a wave of anti-incumbent results in elections around the world. In this view, the results were more a rejection of Joe Biden’s administration and his vice president, Kamala Harris, than they were an embrace of Trump—and part of a broad trend of dissatisfaction among voters in many countries.

The specific motivations of the global anti-incumbent wave have never been entirely obvious. They include a post-COVID hangover but also deeper running dissatisfaction with democratic systems of government. Whatever the reasons, the trend is an important shift. Parties lose power from time to time in any country with free and fair elections, but political scientists have long observed that incumbents have an electoral advantage. In the modern United States, for example, Trump’s and Biden’s single presidential terms were outliers. If voters’ default stance is to throw the bums out after only one term or a few years, parties and leaders will struggle to create lasting policy changes. This creates instability and conflict, as politicians try more extreme tactics to achieve their goals.

Lula’s poor showing in the first round, at least, is a sign that the anti-incumbent wave has not receded since 2024. Indeed, politicians across the political spectrum have faced serious voter anger this year. In Hungary, a broad coalition emerged to eject the right-wing strongman Viktor Orbán, who, my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker noted, had been viewed as un-oustable. In Denmark, the governing coalition lost seats, though Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a centrist, was eventually able to form a new, weaker government. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is unpopular, and his future looks precarious, as parties on both the left and the right have gained in state elections, leaving his centrist government teetering. And today, the center-left Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called for a November 29 snap election for Parliament, with polls showing his party trailing behind the center-right Popular Party.

The power of the anti-incumbent wave is demonstrated by the fact that it now threatens to wash out some of the same parties and politicians it previously carried in. Lula’s victory in Brazil’s 2022 election was in part a testament to voters rejecting the government of the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro. Now the same dissatisfaction could swamp Lula and elect Bolsonaro’s son.

In the United Kingdom, anti-incumbent currents helped defeat a long-running Conservative government in 2024. The result was a landslide: Conservatives lost 251 seats while Labour picked up 211 and a huge majority. But Prime Minister Keir Starmer lasted just two years in office before sagging popularity led to his effective toppling by another Labour politician, Andy Burnham. In what may be a canny reading of the global mood, Burnham has rejected suggestions that he call an election before he is required to do so, in 2029.

Finally, there’s Trump, who benefited from anti-incumbent sentiments in 2024 but may be burned by them in November. Voters may not have liked Biden, but now that they’ve seen Trump back in the White House, they like him even less. Among other issues, the inflation that hurt Biden (and other global incumbents) in 2024 has persisted and sometimes worsened under Trump. Midterm elections in the U.S. are usually defeats for the sitting president’s party, but many analysts now forecast a larger-than-normal Democratic victory. Trump has begged voters to act as though he is on the ballot, but that may be imprudent.

Anti-incumbency is a global trend, but it can have big effects on domestic politics. In the United States, Trump treated his narrow 2024 win as a huge popular mandate. Although that was a political overreach, he has managed to radically reshape the federal government and foreign policy. In Brazil, a new Bolsonaro presidency would jerk the country back toward the right after a leftward lurch under Lula. As long as voters remain this dyspeptic, however, any new approach should be treated as fragile and fleeting.

Related:

• Why everyone thinks their government has failed (From 2025)
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Today’s News

1. The Supreme Court opened its new term by hearing a case over whether Boulder, Colorado, can hold Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy liable for local damages from climate change. The justices focused on whether federal law blocks such lawsuits and whether the Court has jurisdiction to hear the case; a ruling could potentially affect dozens of similar cases nationwide.
2. A researcher at a Russian anti-plague institute died from a suspected case of pneumonic plague, and as many as 189 people are reportedly under medical observation. The World Health Organization said the cause has not been confirmed and that no contacts have shown symptoms so far.
3. The U.S. military removed all of its bombers from a British air base used for strikes on Iran yesterday after a suspected terror plot targeted the base. Six people have been arrested and released on bail in the investigation.

Dispatches

• Video Village: Introducing a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.

• The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores the strange power of coincidence.

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Evening Read

What Is Zionism?

By Adam Kirsch

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The attack was the worst disaster in the history of the Jewish state. Three years later, it’s clear that it was an even greater disaster for Palestinians. Determined to punish Hamas and prevent future attacks, Israel responded with a devastating invasion of Gaza that killed more than 70,000 people; it estimates at least 22,000 were combatants. Today, 2 million Palestinians, 80 percent of the population of Gaza, have been displaced from their homes.

But if Hamas was defeated militarily, it largely succeeded in its goal of swinging Western public opinion against Israel. The spectacle of Israeli powerlessness followed by the violent display of Israeli power profoundly changed the way the Jewish state is seen and discussed. Perhaps the best way to gauge that change is to look at the transformation of the word Zionist.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.