President Donald Trump's choice for US senator from Texas, State Attorney General Ken Paxton, made dismissive comments about the 21 innocent people slaughtered during the Uvalde school shooting in 2022.

"There's always a plan," Paxton said in recently-uncovered footage. "I believe God always has a plan. Life is short, no matter what it is."

The audio clip is only likely to hurt a candidate who is already trailing Democratic State Sen. James Talarico despite the two men running against each other in a solidly red state. On Wednesday CNN reported that one of Paxton's fellow Republicans, former state Rep. Glenn Rogers, released an ad saying that he would never endorse the embattled fellow partisan.

"The ad will run statewide on digital and streaming platforms as part of the group’s eight-figure effort in the general election," CNN reported through a spokesperson at the political action committee running the Rogers ad. "It comes as Democrats confront a spike in outside GOP spending in recent days, suddenly giving Paxton’s side a huge advertising advantage in the closing weeks of the tight race."

Even though the incumbent in the Senate seat is Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican who has loyally supported Trump, Trump shocked the political world by instead endorsing Paxton. The political consensus is that Talarico will be far more competitive against Paxton than he would have been against the popular Cornyn.

"At the exact same moment, Trump casually ended Sen. John Cornyn's political career with a single endorsement of the far more MAGA-coded Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas," Douglas Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, told The New York Times in May. "Ironically, Trump helping Paxton win the primary delivers his MAGA faithful a short-term win while putting the seat itself in real jeopardy. Democratic nominee James Talarico is a much more plausible threat to Paxton than he would have been to Cornyn, and a Republican Senate majority that looked safe a week ago no longer does."

MS NOW's Chris Hayes also pointed out at the time that Trump's betrayal of Cornyn for Paxton betrays political weakness rather than the strength he likely intended to project.

“If you looked just at the percentages of last night’s Senate runoff in Starr County, you would say Trump is still dominating,” wrote MS NOW’s Chris Hayes on Thursday. “His candidate beat Cornyn there by nearly 50 points. But what’s that percentage based on? How many Republicans actually voted in that runoff? The answer: virtually none.”

Hayes continued, “Only 90 votes were cast out of more than 36,000 registered voters in the county, according to the Texas secretary of state’s office. In that same county, in a single Democratic primary for a local judge back in March, more than 13,000 Democrats turned out to vote.”

President Donald Trump's close relationship with Russia has long troubled observers. Now an author and Russia expert who recently wrote a book on Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a theory as to why.

"President Donald Trump excessively appeases Putin out of fear because he knows the Russian dictator likely has serious dirt on him, the author Luke Harding has alleged," reported The Daily Beast's Vic Verbalaitis on Wednesday. "Appearing on The Daily Beast Podcast, Harding told host Joanna Coles that Trump, 80, is 'afraid' of the Russian president, 73, because of the Kremlin’s sweeping surveillance operations."

Verbalaitis added, "'The Betrayal: Trump, Putin and The New Age of Conquest' author said that while working as a correspondent in Moscow in 2007, he experienced firsthand the frightening extent to which the Russian government monitored him and his family. Harding described how the country’s Federal Security Service (FSB) broke into his family’s apartment and planted bugs, which they used to keep eyes on them even during their most intimate moments."

The Daily Beast journalist continued, "U.S. intelligence officials have already said Russia meddled in the 2020 election to benefit Trump." He wrote that "they made it clear that they were watching us because on one occasion, we came back from a family holiday in Berlin and they’d left a sex manual in Russian by the side of the marital bed, and I had to say to my wife, you know, ‘Darling, this really isn’t mine. The KGB have introduced this.’'"

After describing how he believes he was surveilled by Russian intelligence, Harding speculated that Trump is similarly alarmed.

“The reason I tell you this is that the... FSB, KGB, are adept at surveillance,” Harding told The Daily Beast. “They break in and watch everybody. And of course, that means there’ll be... tapes of Donald Trump.”

Writing earlier on Wednesday, another foreign policy expert broke down how Trump's handling of foreign policy has empowered both Russia and another rival superpower to the United States, China.

"In his first book, 'A World Restored,' Henry Kissinger argued that a stable and legitimate order rests on a limited consensus: an understanding among the major powers about what he called the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy," Brookings Institute senior fellow and former foreign policy adviser to President Joe Biden, Thomas Wright, wrote for The Atlantic. "Governments can compete intensely and violate rules without seeking to overturn the system itself. The danger arises when a major power becomes so dissatisfied with the limits imposed upon it that it adopts a revolutionary foreign policy."

In February Joseph Bosco, who served as China country director under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from 2005 to 2006, argued in The Hill that Trump's foreign policies have sacrificed America's greatness.

“History will brand the U.S. failure to ensure Ukraine’s victory and prevent Taiwan’s fall as the time when America fell from greatness and her ‘cunning’ but miscalculating enemies plunged the world into a new global conflict,” Bosco explained.

President Donald Trump visibly flinched during a military jet flyover while he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping for a summit on Wednesday. The media noticed — and decided to mock him for his seeming frailty.

"What happens to Trump here?" liberal commentator Ed Krassenstein wrote on X. "Did he just have a mini stroke?"

The Daily Beast observed that "the 80-year-old president recoiled at a flyover, ducking and baring his teeth, while Xi Jinping stood stoically beside him."

New York Times bestselling author Don Winslow "now you see why Trump got 5 deferments from Vietnam. Even just the SOUND of a plane flyover is too much for the fat baby in makeup and a diaper. Look at the President of China. No reaction."

Liberal commentator Keith Olbermann posted that "Trump shoulda just let that White House pool boycott alone. Look what he bought himself."

Meanwhile the popular account Republicans against Trump simply wrote "Holy s——."

Liberal commentator Jim Stewartson broke down the footage by saying, "Watch Xi in comparison. It’s not that loud, but Trump’s brain does not filter input correctly anymore due to his worsening frontotemporal dementia. The sound made his nervous system go into full overload — which registers as pain. Note the glove. It is not cold. Sad."

Meanwhile pro-Trump pundit Nick Sortor, who often contributes to Newsmax, wrote "LMAO! A surprise SUPERSONIC BOMBER flyover at President Trump's welcome ceremony for Xi Jinping just caught EVERYONE off guard It was a B-1 Lancer with FULL afterburner, RIPPING through during the Star Spangled Banner Freaking legendary."

Experts have observed other signs of Trump's apparent decline. Speaking to AlterNet earlier in September, psychiatrist Dr. David M. Reiss — who co-authored the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President" — warned AlterNet that the mainstream media is not adequately covering the president's mental health issues.

"The press is treating it as if this is just him," Reiss told AlterNet. "No, this is a very disturbed — in a vernacular, deranged — person. He says things that don't make sense, goes on for two hours. This is not normal behavior, not productive behavior, and obviously a lot of it is lies. So the diagnosis really isn't relevant. What's relevant is: if this was a friend, if this was a relative, would you say this person needs help if they're not getting it — and if they are getting it, they should see a different doctor because it's not being treated effectively."

He added, "That's not what the press is saying. The press is acting like this is just his style, or making bizarre excuses, or ignoring it."

President Donald Trump's agricultural policies are leaving one of his staunchest groups of supporters, farmers, in the lurch. As they increasingly turn against him because the Iran war, tariffs and mass deportations, a conservative newspaper — The Wall Street Journal — warns that he is leaving Republicans overall "in danger."

"While Mr. Trump can claim all he wants that foreigners pay his tariffs, Deere & Co. said on an earnings call last month that it expects 'direct tariff expense of approximately $1.1 billion for the fiscal year,'" the editorial board wrote on Wednesday. "That figure doesn’t include the refunds the company is getting for the tariffs that the Supreme Court held illegal, but it’s a show of the burden. Mr. Trump’s border taxes filter through supply chains to all kinds of parts and equipment, making it harder for farmers when they buy tractors, combines, harvesters and planters."

They added, "Likewise, Mr. Trump can say over and over that the U.S. doesn’t need anything from Canada, but the Farm Belt knows it depends on potash fertilizer from America’s northern neighbor. Mr. Trump’s latest 50 percent tariffs on Canada specifically didn’t apply to potash, which ought to be telling. Some Canadians, however, have debated using their potash as leverage against the U.S. if trade tensions escalate."

Overall they concluded that, as a result of how Trump's policies are hurting farmers, "Republicans are now in political danger in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, states that 'oughta be fat guy layups for us,' as Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy put it last week."

They added, "If the administration wants farming in the U.S. to be easier, then stop the policies that make it harder."

Speaking with AlterNet in September, Dr. Karl Widerquist, a Georgetown University in Qatar professor, explained how Trump's policies are hurting farmers.

"The supply chains go back and forth across the border — you've gotta know what's going back and forth across the border," Widerquist told AlterNet. "You've gotta really be an expert in very specific industries. Some goods might pass the border three and four times. You'd take oil from Canada and put it in a combine in the United States to make wheat, and you send it up to Canada for processing, send it back to the United States to sell it as food, not to mention adding a bunch of packaging who knows where. You have a really complex supply chain. So tariffs aren't as simple as these. Used to be it was our industries and their industries, put a tariff on their industries, that's gonna help our industries, at least in that sector."

“Y'all know the Farm Bill is socialism; y'all know that, right?” Michael Steele said on MS NOW at the time. “I mean, when you start talking about socialism, it's socialism for you. It's not socialism when I'm accessing the system and I'm getting that SNAP check, and I'm getting that welfare check, and I'm getting that free lunch program, and I'm getting those things that, because I cannot afford it, are part of a safety net. And I wish we would just fundamentally get off our lazy behinds and start understanding how this government uses all of those tools to provide for its citizens.”

Even as President Donald Trump rages about a judge ruling on his media ban, despite the decision not yet coming in, a journalist who Trump previously banned from covering him appeared on a podcast described him as unstable — and hinted that this has ominous implications for the American people.

"There's something deeply disturbing about this moment," Jim Acosta, who Trump targeted when he worked at CNN, told podcaster Molly Jong-Fast on Wednesday. "We can laugh and whistle past the graveyard and everything, but it's not normal to want to put your name on Ford's Theatre. It's not normal to want to put your name on the Kennedy Center. It's not normal to want snipers on top of a massive arch near Arlington National Cemetery that apparently is going to be packed with ammunition."

"That's definitely going to get built, in case you're wondering," Jong-Fast interjected.

"This is very Muammar Gaddafi," Acosta continued. "This is very Saddam-Hussein-in-the-spider-hole kind of stuff. And we can ignore it — I don't ignore it, I know you don't ignore it, but a lot of people ignore it. I think it's a bad idea to ignore it. I think we're going to wake up one morning and bad stuff's going to be going down, because that's it, he's finally snapped. I think we're on the verge of that right now. When I saw the Ford's Theatre thing, I was like, 'Wow.' I thought it was as weird as it was going to get, but apparently not."

Jong-Fast replied, "We really have elevated someone who is not that interested in governance, not at all interested in policy, super interested in narcissistic honoring of himself. And also, his frontal lobe is not functioning in the way you would want a frontal lobe to function."

Acosta agreed, replying that "I think it would not be a bad idea for things to be studied by scientists years from now."

Acosta is not alone in criticizing Trump's seeming lack of stability. On a psychological level, Dr. David M. Reiss — a psychiatrist who contributed to the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President" — told AlterNet in September that Trump is clearly mentally deteriorating but benefits from a media that refuses to call this out.

"The press is treating it as if this is just him," Reiss told AlterNet. "No, this is a very disturbed — in a vernacular, deranged — person. He says things that don't make sense, goes on for two hours. This is not normal behavior, not productive behavior, and obviously a lot of it is lies. So the diagnosis really isn't relevant. What's relevant is: if this was a friend, if this was a relative, would you say this person needs help if they're not getting it — and if they are getting it, they should see a different doctor because it's not being treated effectively."

A different expert argued in June that Trump is also suffering from a physical decline.

“There is no tool for using A.I. to make that kind of a statement that is accepted in the cardiology community,” Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist who specializes in aging, told The New York Times. “It hasn’t been validated to a point where it could be used for biological age versus chronological age.”

He later added, “The doctors deserve praise and he deserves praise because of managing his cholesterol,” but noted that the doctors have been sparing about important details regarding his cardiovascular health. “It’s possible he has no buildup, but that should be specifically presented.”

President Donald Trump's foreign policy is such a disaster, it is returning the international community back to the conditions that existed before World War II — at least, according to one foreign policy expert.

As Trump meets with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, threatens Iran with annihilation and fails to counter both China and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, he is upending a world order that created stability for more than eighty years, argued Thomas Wright, Brookings Institution senior fellow and former senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council for President Joe Biden, for The Atlantic on Wednesday.

"In his first book, 'A World Restored,' Henry Kissinger argued that a stable and legitimate order rests on a limited consensus: an understanding among the major powers about what he called the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy," Wright wrote. "Governments can compete intensely and violate rules without seeking to overturn the system itself. The danger arises when a major power becomes so dissatisfied with the limits imposed upon it that it adopts a revolutionary foreign policy."

He added, "Under the old international order, major powers did not, as a general rule, conquer and annex the territory of their neighbors. The global trading system was based on reciprocity, tariffs were historically low, and markets were relatively open. And, although it was the world’s strongest country, the United States exercised enough self-discipline to allow its allies to grow into genuine partners, not vassals to be constantly squeezed for concessions."

Wright then described how Russia and China have violated that world order, in the former case by invading Ukraine and in the latter by engaging in unfair trade practices.

"Since taking office for a second term, in 2025, Trump has turned American power against U.S. allies and partners," Wright said. "He imposed the highest tariffs in nearly a century on Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, and the European Union and used the threat of more to extract hundreds of billions of dollars in investment pledges. He mused about making Canada the 51st state and seizing Greenland. He pushed Ukraine to sign over a share of its mineral wealth in the middle of a war for its national survival. Under Trump, the United States sees itself not as the guarantor of an alliance system of like-minded democracies, but as a dominant power that wields its influence for singular, transactional gain."

He continued, "Trump has broken the restraint that made American primacy tolerable to most of the rest of the world. Reports suggest that he may meet Xi and Putin for a 'big three' trilateral on the margins of the Asia Pacific Economic Summit in Shenzhen in November, which could mark the formal end of the old order."

Ultimately, Wright said that a future American president will need to resign themselves to the fact that the old international order is over.

"The international order has come to an end," Wright wrote. "The next president will inherit one of the most unforgiving international environments since 1945. Their task will be to stop the deterioration, inject some stability into world affairs, and begin to lay the foundation for a better future, even if that is not achievable in the short term."

Speaking with AlterNet earlier in September, University of Massachusetts — Amherst professor Dr. Richard Wolff broke down the larger pattern in Trump's disintegration of the world order.

"The United States helped allied countries recover from the war with the Marshall Plan and things like that," Wolff told AlterNet. "But those, the beneficiary countries, including Western Europe and Japan, were markedly contrasted with the countries that got no help at all, Russia and China being the number one examples, because of communist control in Russia, and then after 1949 also in China. And so those countries had to make it, if you like, on their own. They had to recover from horrific war-related damage. I mean, Russia and China probably ranked one and two in the amount of damage done during and by World War II, before, during, and after it, as any countries on earth."

Also speaking with AlterNet in September, Dr. Ed Gresser, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, described Trump's fixation on Canada as "weird."

"He seems to have some real animus against Canada for reasons I don't understand," Gresser told AlterNet. "And that goes well beyond tariffs, although tariffs are kind of the main policy thing, but he's always sort of belittling Canada and calling it the 51st state and things like that. And it's just very — there must be — there seems to be something really personal involved in this, which I don't feel I have any insight into. It's just, it's weird."

President Donald Trump suffered a major blow in his attempt to ban three media outlets that are critical of him — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — from covering him at the White House.

"Judge Kelly's hearing on President Trump's media ban," reported Politico's Kyle Cheney on X. "Immediately makes clear he's bound by D.C. Circuit precedent that upholds due process protections for WH reporters who hold hard passes."

Judge Timothy Kelly directly said, "I think it is fair to say that the process ... wasn't followed here."

Earlier on Wednesday, MS NOW's Rachel Maddow explained why she thinks those networks have been targeted.

"I have always had this theory that Trump doesn't come after MS NOW more than he does other news organizations — even though I think of all the mainstream media organizations, we're probably the most critical of him," Maddow told her audience. "I've always thought that he maybe doesn't come after us in a more concerted way because he's talked himself into the idea that that will help us, right? That that will elevate us, and so he shouldn't pay us attention because we're always going to be, you know, who we are and that it'll only help us, and therefore hurt him to give us too much attention."

Maddow added, "So he decides to sort of diffuse the attention on us by bringing in these other news organizations. But in so doing, he ends up taking this swipe that just seems sort of weird and inchoate and also very clarifying to the news business that this is the kind of thing that we ought to all stand up against together."

Trump's press team openly admitted when kicking out those reporters that they did so because they felt the publications were "fabricating facts or reporting verifiable falsehoods from inside the White House complex is an intentional breach of professional decorum and it is severely disruptive to the mission and purpose of the White House.”

Former Trump Homeland Security official Miles Taylor explained on Tuesday that the Trump White House actively gloats about penalizing reporters who write things they do not like.

"Anyone hoping the losses (in 2018) would humble him was sorely mistaken," Taylor said. "Donald Trump was on the attack. He fired his attorney general, spoke openly about ejecting his chief of staff and set his sights on Cabinet members who challenged his erraticism and frequent impulses toward illegality. He didn't want anyone around to say 'no' to whatever his warped conscience cooked up next. On the same day, Trump blew up at CNN's Jim Acosta during a post-election press conference for asking uncomfortable questions about the Russia investigation and the president's immigration policies."

He added, "Afterwards, Trump decided he would simply throw him out of the White House, breaking with decades of norms that credentialed members of the press are given access to cover the American presidency. That night, I was at dinner in the restaurant of the Trump Hotel with a member of the president's Cabinet and senior national security officials. A few tables away sat the White House communications chief with a group of aides. They were openly gloating and celebrating, before the story had even hit the news. They'd had the Secret Service stop Acosta and take away his pass. If the press didn't report on Trump the way Trump wanted, he'd censor them."

President Donald Trump's trade and rhetoric wars with Canada are as controversial in the United States as in the targeted country, but a recent report reveals that Canadians are particularly angry at America — and that Canada's capital city is demonstrating this through a potent symbolic gesture.

"A street in Canada’s capital bearing the name of the current U.S. president will be renamed," reported Ted Raymond from CTV News on Wednesday. "Ottawa city council unanimously agreed to a motion to begin the process of renaming Trump Avenue, in Ottawa’s Central Park neighbourhood."

Raymond added, "Trump Avenue is one of several streets in Central Park that references New York City. Other street names include Madison Park, Manhattan Crescent, Bloomingdale Street, and Staten Street. At the time of the neighbourhood’s development, Trump was a famous real estate mogul, but his tumultuous time as president of the United States has led to renewed calls to take his name off street signs in the capital."

In a speech to Ottawan councilors on Wednesday, River Ward Coun. Riley Brockington explained that “as you may appreciate, since I came to office, there have been a number of requests from Trump Avenue residents, residents within Central Park and across our city, and frankly beyond, that would like to see the City of Ottawa engage in a street renaming process."

Brockington added, “I could speak at great length why I believe strongly it is time to rename Trump Avenue, but I don’t want to give a platform anymore to the person who is on the current street sign blades. I do believe this is about a new beginning, and I want this to be a community-led process where the community ultimately will select and recommend to city council what that new name will be.”

Speaking with AlterNet earlier in September, Dr. Ed Gresser, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, explained the broader Canadian economic strategy in response to Trump's tariff wars.

"The Canadian government retaliated with its own set of tariffs, and I think that is sort of what is really the animating thing for the Trump administration and for Trump personally — that only, in its year and a half of trying to impose tariffs on everyone, only China and Canada have really retaliated with their own tariffs on American things," Gresser told AlterNet. "And China has sort of wrestled the administration to a draw more or less. Canada's smaller, more dependent on the United States, and it may be that the administration generally feels they need to retaliate — they need to treat this very seriously, to avoid the potential that other countries might adopt Canada's approach and get back when the administration kind of hits them. I think they would be quite alarmed about that, and so they want to kind of make an example."

He added, "And probably Trump personally is — and he seems to have some real animus against Canada for reasons I don't understand. And that goes well beyond tariffs, although tariffs are kind of the main policy thing, but he's always sort of belittling Canada and calling it the 51st state and things like that. And it's just very — there must be — there seems to be something really personal involved in this, which I don't feel I have any insight into. It's just, it's weird."

Also speaking with AlterNet in September, Dr. Richard D. Wolff — professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst – explained why Canada is so angry at the United States.

"Our government is busy strong-arming people around the world in every way that it can, militarily, economically, politically, and discovering time after time to their amazement, if you take them seriously, that the folks are going to resist," Wolff told AlterNet. "And that's what's going to happen."

On the same day that he was humiliated for the 25th time before a court for trying to force states to hand over their voter rolls, President Donald Trump continued rolling out another aspect of his voter suppression plan — namely, sending Justice Department workers to polling places.

"[Assistant Attorney General Harmeet] Dhillon has the authority to deploy only monitors, not observers," reported Democracy Docket's Jacob Knutson on Tuesday. "Her comments could be a troubling sign that the DOJ may intend to assert expansive powers — far beyond the scope of the department’s traditional monitoring program — for the 1,000 monitors it plans to deploy."

Knutson quoted Dillon as saying, "Federal election monitors from the department are — observers, I should say — are similar to other types of observers you see, so they’re not going to be interfering in any way or running the election."

The Democracy Docket journalist also wrote, "Dhillon went on to refer to observers' rather than monitors for the rest of the interview. She also framed the upcoming federal poll-watching push as the 'biggest DOJ election observer effort in history.'"

Knutson then explained why the distinction between "monitors" and "observers" is such a big deal.

"The difference is important, and her switch seemed deliberate," Knutson wrote. "Under federal law, monitors and observers are two distinct types of poll watchers the federal government can deploy — and observers have a lot more power."

He continued, "Stemming from the Voting Rights Act (VRA), observers have explicit legal authority to enter polling places and closely watch election workers, voters and voting systems at all stages of the election process. Monitors, on the other hand, have no legal authority to enter election sites or watch any specific aspect of the voting process. They are subject to state poll access laws, and several states have already refused to permit them access to polling locations for primary elections this year."

Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the nonprofit good government group Common Cause, explained to AlterNet in June how Trump's suppression efforts like demanding states hand over their voter rolls, sending Justice Department officials to "observe" elections, stop mail-in voting and other measures are anti-democratic.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet at the time. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.” The expert also pointed out that some of Trump's nationalization efforts may be illegal.

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña concluded. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”

Speaking with AlterNet last week about the 2026 midterm elections, Sabato's Crystal Ball editor Kyle Kondik detailed why Trump is expected to suffer setbacks — and likely lose control of one or both houses of Congress — in the 2026 midterm elections.

"It's primarily the president's weak approval rating combined with the usual difficulty that the presidential party has in a midterm," Kondik explained to AlterNet. "I also think there may be even more for voters to react to in 2026 compared to even 2018, because Trump has acted as more of an imperial president and there is more dissatisfaction both with the economy as well as the president's foreign policy choices."

He also said, "Generally speaking, a president who is this unpopular should see his party lose a lot of ground in Congress. That said, Joe Biden also had poor approval in 2022, but Republicans didn't do all that well—they flipped the House but not the Senate. However, the Republican lead in the generic ballot was not as large as the Democratic lead is now."

A Republican lawmaker, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, is accusing President Donald Trump of betraying Republican values by banning media outlets — including CNN, MS NOW and Politico — because they frequently criticize the president.

"I say this as an old school Republican, I find it so unnecessary," Bacon told CNN anchor Erin Burnett. "We want a free media. It's competitive media. You guys compete with each other and the truth comes out. Even if one media source is not on target, the other ones will cover it."

He added, "And it's good for democracy. And I find that picking a fight with the media is beneath what the White House should be doing and we're better than that. And all these petty fights — it's the media, it's Canada, it's Greenland, it's Canada, or Denmark, it's President Macron and his wife — it's just so unnecessary. I think most of us prefer the president focusing on what we need."

Bacon concluded, "We want to be victorious in Iran and get past this. And we need to also stand up better to Russia and President Xi. I think that's what most Americans want, not petty fights."

Burnett then compared Trump's creation of a news channel entirely devoted to himself, TrumpTV, to North Korea's similar propaganda station that is entirely focused on promoting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Bacon replied by saying he is encouraged that other media outlets have stood up for CNN, MS NOW and Politico.

"We have a First Amendment that we should protect," Bacon told Burnett. "I know there's a debate whether this is a violation of the First Amendment or not, but when you restrict some media over other media in the White House, the courts have ruled in the past that that's not right. I think they will do so here as well."

He then said, "But in the end, I think this will backfire on the President and even most Republicans."

This is not the first time that Bacon has opposed Trump over behavior that the Nebraskan characterized as petty or beneath the presidency. Earlier in September, he similarly criticized the president for renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America.

"Some of the things he’s done, it smells like chaos, it smells destructive,” Bacon said, describing the renaming as “silly” and adding that “most people think it’s dumb.”

Even when Bacon has agreed with a Trump policy goal, he has often been critical of how the president has pursued it. For example, in August said that he supports Trump's war against Iran but is highly critical of how he has sold it to the public.

“The case was there, but the president tried to go it alone, and that it was going to be a quick fight. ‘We're gonna make a deal tomorrow. We're going to make a deal next week. A deal is imminent,’ [Trump said]. I think these things have undermined this effort,” Bacon said at the time.

“But if we stop this now, Iran wins and Iran could still produce a nuclear weapon," Bacon continued. "Maybe not as soon as it could have, but with China’s or Russia’s help or north Korea’s help, they can rebuild this capability and they will still be the leading exporter of terrorists. I think the president has to keep this blockade on. He's got to prevail in this fight. Because if he doesn't, we're going to have a worse threat on our hands down the road. But he's sort of put us in a spot where he's backed into a corner with this being an unpopular war. And I just – it goes back from the beginning: He had to this had to be a bipartisan effort, not a one man band. But that's what it became.”

https://youtu.be/3A4RdFkpiJw

President Donald Trump suffered yet another court humiliation Tuesday — indeed, the 25th in a row (and without exception) when it comes to his attempt to force states to provide him with their voter rolls, and thereby guarantee Republicans win the 2026 midterm elections.

"President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice suffered its 25th straight district court loss Tuesday in its nationwide campaign to force states to hand over unredacted voter registration data, after a federal judge in Washington rejected the department’s legal theory and dismissed the case with prejudice," reported Democracy Docket's Yunior Rivas on Tuesday. "U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson, appointed by former President Joe Biden, concluded that DOJ’s demand for Washington’s statewide voter registration list 'violates federal law,' joining what she described as a growing line of courts rejecting nearly identical lawsuits."

She quoted Evanson as saying, “The Government’s reading of 52 U.S.C. § 20701 is not persuasive as a matter of statutory interpretation, nor is it consistent with the purpose of the CRA, the Court joins a growing, unanimous consensus of courts to find that the List is not subject to a Title III demand."

Trump is concerned about Republicans' ability to retain control of the Senate and House of Representatives both because of his low approval ratings and because incumbents usually lose seats during their second term midterm contests (as well as their first term midterms).

"Generally speaking, a president who is this unpopular should see his party lose a lot of ground in Congress," Sabato's Crystal Ball editor Kondik told AlterNet. "That said, Joe Biden also had poor approval in 2022, but Republicans didn't do all that well—they flipped the House but not the Senate. However, the Republican lead in the generic ballot was not as large as the Democratic lead is now."

This was not Trump's only legal setback on Tuesday. There are also early signs that he is going to lose in his attempt to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from covering him at the White House.

"A federal appeals court ruling Tuesday on demonstrators’ access to the steps of the Capitol could bode poorly for President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban three media organizations from the White House," Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported. "The majority opinion, written by Trump appointee Neomi Rao, concluded that the East Steps of the Capitol are a 'nonpublic forum' — just like most areas of the White House grounds, including the press facilities."

Politico continued, "While the government may impose restrictions on access to those nonpublic areas, the limits must be 'viewpoint neutral,' apply 'objective, workable standards' and not permit officials to exercise 'unbridled discretion over a forum’s use,' the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel concluded."

President Donald Trump recently banned three media outlets that he claims were unfairly critical of him — Politico, CNN and MS NOW — from covering him at the White House. Now it has been revealed that he openly admitted that he did so based on their viewpoints, in violation of the First Amendment.

"After MS NOW, CNN and Politico sued the Trump administration on Monday over the president banning their reporters from White House grounds, Trump’s communications team sent congressional Republicans talking points Monday night in defense of the president’s decision," reported MS NOW's Mychael Schnell on Tuesday. "According to the document obtained by MS NOW, the White House wants Republicans to argue that “no president has been more transparent or offered more of his time to the press” and that the First Amendment does not grant reporters access to the White House."

The talking points claimed that the reporters are not protected by the First Amendment to engage in "fabricating facts or reporting verifiable falsehoods from inside the White House complex is an intentional breach of professional decorum and it is severely disruptive to the mission and purpose of the White House.”

The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Despite claiming he has the legal authority to ban those media outlets, early signs from the courts suggest otherwise.

"A federal appeals court ruling Tuesday on demonstrators’ access to the steps of the Capitol could bode poorly for President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban three media organizations from the White House," Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported on Tuesday. "The majority opinion, written by Trump appointee Neomi Rao, concluded that the East Steps of the Capitol are a 'nonpublic forum' — just like most areas of the White House grounds, including the press facilities."

Politico continued, "While the government may impose restrictions on access to those nonpublic areas, the limits must be 'viewpoint neutral,' apply 'objective, workable standards' and not permit officials to exercise 'unbridled discretion over a forum’s use,' the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel concluded."

One of those networks may soon regain Trump's favor. After Trump's billionaire ally David Ellison officially purchased Warner Bros., which owns CNN, media watchdogs expressed alarm that Ellison would gut CNN of journalists who are critical of Trump and replace them with pro-Trump alternatives, much as Ellison did when he took over CBS News.

Trump himself has admitted that he wants Ellison to capture CNN for this reason, despite often denying his involvement in helping them take it over. Trump told CNN's Jake Tapper in July that "we're trying to have CNN go on a normal path." Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has similarly commented that he wants CNN to be taken over by the Ellisons so that the Trump administration will receive more flattering press coverage.

All through 2026, President Donald Trump's billionaire ally David Ellison has tried to purchase Warner Bros. in part — according to many reports — so he can fire CNN journalists who criticize him and replace them with more pro-Trump alternatives. He even had private meetings with both Ellison and their competitor to purchase Warner Bros, Netflix, before the former seemed to indicate his pro-Trump agenda and the latter dropped their bid.

Now that California Attorney General Rob Bonta has dropped his antitrust lawsuit and capitulated to Ellison, it seems the Trumpification of CNN — analogous to how Ellison turned CBS News into a pro-Trump outlet — is inevitable. And at least one top CNN personality has made it clear she will not stick around to work in that environment.

"So it’s only a few months, right?" CNN journalist Kara Swisher told podcaster Scott Galloway on Tuesday. "I’m just, I just can’t. I just, I thought like I was trying to figure out ways I could work with them in some like licensing way."

Swisher then added that she ultimately decided staying at CNN would simply not be worth it, saying "I got too much to do with you, Scott Galloway."

Galloway pointed out that Ellison will likely be happy to be rid of Swisher, speculating that their attitude will be that "when you show up to whoever it is you show up to at CNN and say, I want out of my contract, they jump up and say, ‘Congratulations, no problem.’"

Swisher agreed, but concluded: “No, I’m just saying. I just don’t want to work. They don’t want me. I don’t want them, and I have been very explicit."

She also told Galloway, “I think they are terrible media owners. I’d rather work for Rupert Murdoch."

Despite occasionally denying his involvement in helping the Ellisons take over CNN so he can benefit, Trump admitted in July that "we're trying to have CNN go on a normal path." Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has also said that he looks forward to CNN being purchased by the Ellisons so they can get more favorable coverage.

Writing for The Washington Post in March, journalist Scott Nover further elaborated on the Ellisons and how they play into the president's plans to silence his main critics.

"CNN, a longtime target of Trump's complaints about the media, is among the most prominent assets in Paramount's pending acquisition of Warner Bros., which requires approval from the Justice Department," Nover wrote. "Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle and a longtime friend and ally to Trump, has financially backstopped Paramount's pending deal to buy Warner Bros. and is also a major investor in the White House-blessed deal that spun off TikTok into a U.S. company. That has helped rebrand the tech billionaire and his son David into media tycoons — with some help from Trump."

Nover continued, "The (Trump) administration's posture toward Paramount's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn scrutiny since a bidding war erupted over the troubled media giant late last year."

President Donald Trump's Republican Party is suffering so immensely in pre-midterm polling, experts are starting to wonder if there is something funky with the polls themselves. If not, then Trump could be in for a shellacking worse than he suffered during his first term's midterm contests, in which Democrats gained 40 seats in the House of Representatives even while losing two in the Senate.

"To be clear, I am concerned about polls being loaded up for Ds (and I note some of those concerns on a couple of newsy polls in my piece today that otherwise moves a lot of races toward Ds)," Sabato's Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik posted on X on Tuesday. "But we also have to be open to the possibility that this is 2018 on steroids."

Writing for the Sabato's Crystal Ball website, Kondik elaborated on his position.

"We also are pushing Ohio’s open gubernatorial race as well as Gov. Joe Lombardo’s (R-NV) reelection bid from Leans Republican to Toss-up," Kondik wrote. "We have resisted making this pair of moves for months because of the Buckeye State’s generic GOP lean as well as Lombardo’s incumbency, but we can no longer justify looking at the Republicans as favorites in either race given broader trends. Republicans have had big spending edges in both races but they still both appear highly competitive."

Speaking with AlterNet last week about the 2026 midterm elections, Kondik broke down the variables that work against the chances of Trump's Republican Party.

"It's primarily the president's weak approval rating combined with the usual difficulty that the presidential party has in a midterm," Kondik told AlterNet. "I also think there may be even more for voters to react to in 2026 compared to even 2018, because Trump has acted as more of an imperial president and there is more dissatisfaction both with the economy as well as the president's foreign policy choices."

When asked to compare Trump's 2026 predicament with those of president's in analogous positions, Kondik drew some important parallels.

"Generally speaking, a president who is this unpopular should see his party lose a lot of ground in Congress," Kondik told AlterNet. "That said, Joe Biden also had poor approval in 2022, but Republicans didn't do all that well—they flipped the House but not the Senate. However, the Republican lead in the generic ballot was not as large as the Democratic lead is now."

In June, Common Cause’s Policy Director in the Voting and Fair Representation Program Susannah Goodman raised the alarm that Trump might meddle in the midterm elections — which are controlled at the state and local level — in order to rig them for his Republican Party.

“The other thing is that, as you well know, the administration has been trying to compel states to turn their voter rolls over to the federal government and to consolidate all of that in a mega database,” Goodman argued. “A number of states have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls with personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, et cetera. Common Cause and our partners have intervened in, I think, 17 of those cases on behalf of voters.”

She continued, “I don't believe there has been a single case, Dan — correct me if I'm wrong — where, when the state has resisted and claimed they are not going to turn these voter rolls over, the court has dismissed the case or compelled the states to turn them over. The government has not had a compelling reason, and the states have won. So when states fight back, they win. We have been involved in that litigation. That is another huge power grab by the administration. It is also an illegal power grab, and when we have pushed back, we have won.”

President Donald Trump — who has vowed and so far successfully managed to ban critical news outlets like MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House — suffered a major legal blow in that anti-free press crusade.

"A federal appeals court ruling Tuesday on demonstrators’ access to the steps of the Capitol could bode poorly for President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban three media organizations from the White House," Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein wrote on Tuesday. "The majority opinion, written by Trump appointee Neomi Rao, concluded that the East Steps of the Capitol are a 'nonpublic forum' — just like most areas of the White House grounds, including the press facilities."

Cheney and Gerstein added, "While the government may impose restrictions on access to those nonpublic areas, the limits must be 'viewpoint neutral,' apply 'objective, workable standards' and not permit officials to exercise 'unbridled discretion over a forum’s use,' the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel concluded."

They continued, "'A regulation that grants the government arbitrary control over who may speak invites the suppression of disfavored viewpoints and undermines the First Amendment’s core protections,' wrote Rao, who was joined in the majority by Judge Karen Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee."

Trump, meanwhile, posted on Truth Social on Monday that he has imposed the bans explicitly because he dislikes how those outlets cover him.

"Fake News people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our National Security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World," Trump posted on his own social media platform.

In addition to trying to ban outlets that say things he does not like, Trump also recently launched his own 24/7 news network, Trump TV, which he describes as a live-streaming YouTube channel that includes "the Trump Administration's biggest moments all in one place."

Writing for The i Paper on Sunday, columnist James Ball argued that Trump is also trying to stimulate his own base in addition to stifling media critics.

"It is typical of Trump, when things aren’t going his way, to lash out," Ball argued. "Sometimes, this is savvy: Trump’s followers have historically liked it when he gets into a fight with the mainstream media, and at the moment they are far less enthusiastic about Trump than once they were. On paper, this could be an effort to pick a fight that would cheer up the MAGA base."

President Donald Trump is an outspoken supporter of AI — but that support is coming with a price on his personal life, particularly his controversial relationship with Natalie Harp.

Referring to a false image of Trump and Harp kissing, MS NOW's Kaivan Shroff reported on Sunday, "The image of Trump and Harp does not survive a close inspection. Snopes reported that the clearest version of the image was watermarked as having been edited with artificial intelligence tools. Harp’s hand in the image has six fingers."

Shroff added, "Debunking a claim when a falsehood spreads so quickly is already a challenge. Asking people to question what they have just seen with their own eyes is even harder. But Harp’s close relationship with Trump has been widely reported in recent weeks, including reverential letters, in which she calls him her 'Guardian and Protector in this Life,' and his $45,000 gift to her and two other aides. That was all the fuel the fake image needed to spread like wildfire. Its existence was consequential enough that it merited an official denial from the White House."

He continued, "No one in American politics has done more than Trump to make fake imagery a routine tool of political communication — and now, fittingly, it has been turned back on him."

Shroff then reviewed the history of misinformation in modern American politics, from the pre-AI lies about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden's refusal to spread AI slop to the various ways Trump has utilized AI to both promote his brand and denigrate his enemies. Now, with incidents like the fake image of him kissing Harp, the AI trend that Trump has capitalized on has boomeranged against him.

"After all, whether the Harp story or the next one that comes around, media outlets can publish fact-checks, the White House can offer denials and social media users can try to correct one another," Shroff wrote. "But a meaningful number of Americans will never unsee what they saw with their own eyes or read the debunking hours or days later. Trump has set the rules of the game on generative AI in our modern politics. At least for this round, he is losing. The rules need to change sooner rather than later. Maybe they finally will as more of the politicians who weaponize AI slop inevitably get burned by it themselves — and Trump has volunteered to go first."

Despite Trump being hoisted by his own AI petard, he has been a vigorous defender of the technology.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump posted on Truth Social earlier in September, “and the USA has that, in spades!”

He also accused critics of AI of being manipulated by the Chinese government.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump added. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

Trump has done his best to bury the story about his unusually close relationship with Harp. She reportedly is by his side as often or more so than most of his other staffers, constantly showering him with compliments, leaving him affectionate notes and printing out articles she wants him to read. When Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) briefly mentioned in August the fact that Trump allowed innocent people to be used as unknowing decoys during a reported possible assassination attempt while fleeing on a jet gifted to him by Qatar, Trump supporters immediately claimed Ossoff's attack on Harp was below the belt (even though he never explicitly accused them of having an affair).

“He didn't attack a young woman for doing her job,” Bryan Lanza, Communications Director for President Donald J. Trump's Transition Team, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt at the time. “That young woman, Natalie — she has parents who are probably appalled by Ossoff's behavior today, and by what he implied. So I think, you know, where we've seen the Democratic Party go is a race to the gutter.”

He added, “The Republican Party has sort of been there already — we've floated in that space. But now the Democratic Party, and like Ossoff, who's the leading potential frontrunner for the Democratic Party — people are cheering the fact that he maligned somebody who has sacrificed a significant amount of their livelihood to serve this country.”

Lanza concluded, “I think they're both the gutter, but that's gutter politics. That's where we are today. That's where we've been for a while. It's where we've landed. And that's where we're going to stay.”

Former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams laughed at Lanza's indication during that CNN segment.

“I love you, man, I appreciate that,” the laughing Williams said. “I just — it's a little rich, after nearly a decade of Donald Trump, for anyone in the United States to start pointing a finger at someone for rhetoric or language around, frankly, sex.”

Knowing that Republican successes in the upcoming midterm elections depend in part on lowering gas prices, President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed they either are already down or will soon go down.

Both experts and Trump's fellow Republicans disagree with him.

“But that’s going to come tumbling down,” Trump said when describing gas prices on Wednesday, according to a report by The Hill's Julia Manchester on Sunday. “That’s going to be like rocket ships in reverse.”

Similarly, in August Trump said that “remember, we inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country. We took over -- what a mess it was, and we were bringing down prices and we brought down prices and nobody can believe what is going on.”

Yet according to the report by The Hill, Trump's statements about lower and/or soon-to-be-lowered gas prices are contradicted by others who are in the know.

"Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-N.D.) said earlier this week that he is 'open to exploring' an export ban for diesel fuel if it 'would take pressure off of prices,'" Manchester reported. "Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told reporters at the Group of 20 summit in Houston this week that a ban on U.S. fuel or oil exports would likely not lower prices. 'We would consider an export ban if we thought that actually might lower prices, but that’s not the case,' the secretary said. "

Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at Gulf Oil, spoke to The Hill in greater detail about what is likely to happen when it comes to diesel prices.

“I think prices remain above six [dollars], and seven is not out of the realm of possibility,” Kloza explained. “I think gasoline remains above four.”

Kloza added that potential conditions like a Gulf of Mexico hurricane could further increase diesel prices.

“Not much the president can do about this, too,” Kloza argued. “I’m surprised that he hasn’t yet used the threat of export curbs or [windfall profits tax] to spook some of the hot money out of gasoline and diesel, but they haven’t done that yet.”

Speaking to AlterNet in April, economist Dr. Robert J. Shapiro — a top adviser to former President Bill Clinton — explained how Trump's war against Iran virtually guarantees that gas prices will remain high for the foreseeable future.

“Even if hostilities do not restart, the price of oil will not return to pre-Trump levels because there’s a new risk premium that they could restart at any time, increasing tanker insurance costs for example, and because oil infrastructure has been degraded, reducing supply for some time,” Shapiro told AlterNet. “An Iran-controlled toll to use the Strait will produce big bucks for Iran, but its impact on world prices for oil, natural gas, helium, etc. should be minimal. Another source of economic friction will be the now-intense uncertainty about what the Trump administration will do next—in the Mideast and in scores of policies at home; and uncertainty dampens investment.”

He added, “As it is, the economy was weakening before this crisis began, and these and other factors will exacerbate those downward pressures. A resolution over the next two weeks will not stop the deterioration in economic conditions.”

Despite Trump's responsibility for rising gas prices, there are Trump voters who plan on backing Republicans anyway in the upcoming midterm elections.

"Dan Lloyd, who voted for Trump, lamented the president’s leadership as the 63-year-old carpenter paid $4.39 a gallon to fill up his pickup truck in Mesa, Arizona," Fortune's Steve Peoples, Jesse Bedayn and Jonathan J. Cooper, along with The Associated Press, wrote on Sunday. "'He hurt himself stepping into this,' Lloyd said of Trump. 'Where’s all this oil from Venezuela? I thought we were flush with gas and everything, but no. The American people eat it every time, whether it’s interest rates, food, gasoline.'"

He added, "Still, he expects to vote Republican in the midterms. 'I think the Democratic Party has lost its way,' Lloyd said. 'I just feel like the whole system’s on the verge of collapse.'"

A recent report interviewed President Donald Trump supporters who know his economic policies are hurting them — but will still vote Republican in the upcoming midterm elections.

"Dan Lloyd, who voted for Trump, lamented the president’s leadership as the 63-year-old carpenter paid $4.39 a gallon to fill up his pickup truck in Mesa, Arizona," reported Fortune's Steve Peoples, Jesse Bedayn and Jonathan J. Cooper, along with The Associated Press, on Sunday. ""He hurt himself stepping into this,' Lloyd said of Trump. 'Where’s all this oil from Venezuela? I thought we were flush with gas and everything, but no. The American people eat it every time, whether it’s interest rates, food, gasoline.'"

He added, "Still, he expects to vote Republican in the midterms. 'I think the Democratic Party has lost its way,' Lloyd said. 'I just feel like the whole system’s on the verge of collapse.'"

Five-two-year-old Kristin Jimenez, who lives in Edinburg, Texas, expressed a similarly cavalier attitude.

“We’ve paid the same price under Republican presidents, we’ve paid this price under Democrat presidents,” Jimenez said, adding that she will vote Republican because they are the “lesser of two evils.”

She added, “We don’t mind paying $8 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but we have a problem paying four bucks at the pump? Make it make sense.”

Speaking to AlterNet in August, cult expert Dr. Steve Hassan deconstructed the cult-like dynamics behind support for Trump, in particular by so demonizing his opponents that Trump supporters will back him even if doing so is personally harmful to them.

"I emphasize how these destructive groups, like the Trump movement, are lying all the time," Hassan told AlterNet. "And part of the appeal is really about using emotionally leading rhetoric to scare people, to create 'the other,' to demonize. I'll quote Eric Hoffer's 1951 book, 'The True Believer.' He said, 'The strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.' We know that, evolutionarily, we're going to overreact to anything that's a perceived danger or threat to us. So 'owning the libs' means that they are a danger, and he's going to save people from them."

Speaking specifically about Trump supporters who engage in trollish behavior, University of Bristol cognitive scientist Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky told AlterNet in August that a "dark triad" of psychological forces fuel their actions.

"The dark triad — that's what it's called," Lewandowsky told AlterNet. "So we know that trolls take pleasure in trolling, which means getting other people upset. And I think that's what we're observing here — this is basically trolling behavior. So would these people score high on the dark triad? I would think yes, but I don't know of any data that's done a personality profile specifically of MAGA voters. We do have it for trolls, though — I have data on that. People have published research on it, and the similarities are just overwhelming. So I'd be very surprised if these were well-adjusted, nice people."

In June, conservative commentator Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark analyzed an ethnographic study of Trump voters that explained the rationalizations they use to justify supporting policies that harm themselves.

Saying that Trump supporters “very explicitly do not want majority rule. They want minority rule," Last pointed out that Trump supporters tend to back him because they oppose Democratic advocacy of racial diversity, women's rights, LGBTQ equality and secularism. Additionally, they are alarmed by young people turning away from intolerance toward racial minorities, women, LGBTQ people and non-Christians.

“I’m not sure how Democrats win over a voter who’s motivated not by unemployment, or the Iranian nuclear program, or the price of eggs—but is rather lashing out because they’re angry that their children rejected their political views,” Last said.

He continued, “We are firmly out of the realm of policy here. Or reality, even. So long as there is a trans activist in San Francisco posting on BlueSky, these people will be aggrieved. Even if their preferred political party holds the presidency, controls Congress, and has an openly corrupt majority in the Supreme Court. Domination of the political system is not enough; they want the people who disgust them to disappear.”

A Republican lawmaker running for reelection in a tight race is trying to distance himself from President Donald Trump — but voters will not let him do so.

In an NPR report on Colorado's third congressional district, journalist Bente Birkeland interviewed voters about their incumbent Republican lawmaker, Rep. Jeff Hurd. While Hurd has attempted to claim he is not a diehard MAGA supporter by saying he opposes Trump's tariffs and sales of public lands, the Coloradans who spoke to Birkeland continued to link him to the unpopular Trump policies that he did support.

Retired teacher Renee McCullough, who is a full-time caregiver to her significantly disabled adult son Chris, told Hurd that they oppose him voting for the so-called Big Beautiful Bill that cut programs like Medicaid while giving money back to wealthy Americans through tax reductions.

"Why would you have voted for that if you know that it's gonna take money and services and everything away from your constituents?" Hurd was asked.

Unaffiliated voter Sandra Hernandez was directly insulting toward Hurd, "Congress is, is failing. They have just turned. They're kind of like my pup, rolled over on their back to rub your belly to the executive branch, do what you want."

Voter Julie Seidel was also scathing in her assessment of Hurd.

"I've been working hard," Seidel told Birkeland. "I believe you're competent. I believe you're a standup guy. But I also think that, to use an old metaphor, you are doing a really good job of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."

Hurd responded to criticisms like these by saying, "And I will tell you, I'm not perfect and I'm gonna make mistakes, and there's probably better ways that I could be doing it and I will strive to be better."

Birkland concluded her report by explaining, "He says he knows a lot of his constituents disagree with him and that's okay. Hurd hopes he can still convince enough voters that he's ultimately on their side."

Last year Trump expressed his unequivocal support for Hurd, posting on his Truth Social platform that Hurd is an "'incredible’ lawmaker with ‘a strong Record of SUCCESS,," continuing that "Jeff Hurd has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election — HE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!"

In February, however, he turned on Hurd because of Hurd's opposition to Trump's tariffs.

“Based on a lack of support … for the unbelievably successful TARIFFS imposed on Foreign Countries and Companies which has made America Richer, Stronger, Bigger, and Better than ever before, I am hereby WITHDRAWING my Endorsement of RINO (Republican In Name Only) Congressman Jeff Hurd, of Colorado’s 3rd District,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, concluding that Hurd “let me and our Country down. He is more interested in protecting Foreign Countries that have been ripping us off for decades than he is the United States of America.”

In response to the backlash against him for destroying the White House East Wing to build a ballroom, President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the ballroom is essential for national security. Now he is whipping out the same excuse for another vanity project — his proposed National Arch.

"President Trump knows that one way to gain advantage in the legal fight over a controversial construction project is to link it to a military need," Politico's Kyle Cheney posted on X on Sunday. He then quoted Trump's post on the president's own Truth Social platform.

"At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage," Trump said. "There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

In a darkly ironic twist, Trump's arch is being criticized by veterans for showing disrespect to individuals who gave their lives protecting America.

"For me, Arlington has been a nice quiet place," Karen Meredith — whose son First Lt. Ken Ballard died during the Iraq War in 2004 — said in a Vote Vets video. "We don't need tourists overlooking funerals. I'm just appalled." Numerous other veterans have echoed Meredith's observation, saying that the arch would figuratively and literally overshadow the cemetery honoring America's fallen veterans.

Despite the widespread opposition from the veterans, however, Trump has stacked federal regulatory agencies with loyalists who are willing to give him whatever he wants.

"For decades, the planning commission reviewing construction projects in Washington has stood by the principle that the federal law limiting the height of buildings in the capital applies to federal projects," New York Times reporters Luke Broadwater, Emily Badger and Junho Lee wrote in July. "But now that President Trump has proposed building a giant triumphal arch, the commission, which is led by Trump allies, is considering a different, more lenient view. On Thursday, (July 9), the National Capital Planning Commission will consider a new interpretation of the 1910 Height of Buildings Act: that it was never meant to apply to federal projects, and certainly not to Mr. Trump's 250-foot arch."

President Donald Trump has made it clear that he will try to rig the 2026 midterm elections to make sure Democrats don't reclaim one or both chambers of Congress.

He has suggested everything from sending law enforcement to polling places to outright seizing ballots, from declaring a national emergency to strong-arming Congress into not accepting results that benefit the Democrats. He has already tried to suppress mail-in ballots and succeeded, in some cases, in forcing states to hand over voter rolls. On a grassroots level, he and his MAGA movement have installed supporters in key positions to deny election results that are favorable to the Democrats.

Instead of simply doing his best to govern well and convince voters to retain Republicans on the basis of his record, Trump is focusing on issues that benefit him personally despite voters overwhelmingly disagreeing with him — building a White House ballroom, renaming the Kennedy Center after himself, promoting AI data centers, waging a trade war against Canada, continuing a literal war against Iran. It seems, for all intents and purposes, that Trump believes he doesn't need to win votes legitimately because he can abuse his power by "nationalizing elections" (which the Constitution prohibits) and thereby prevailing that way.

Against these efforts, Trump's opponents can only hope that Democrats are effective in planning against each of those efforts, as well as use the pre-election polls to call out results that are clearly fishy. Yet will these efforts work?

To learn more, AlterNet spoke with Dr. Christopher Wlezien, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in public opinion, polling, elections and research methodology.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity, context and length.

ROZSA: I'm going to start with what is, to me, the most obvious question. Based on your understanding of the attempts President Trump has made to meddle with the midterm elections — from potentially sending law enforcement to the polls, to suppressing mail-in ballots, to acquiring information about voters from compliant states, to saying he'll file lawsuits in key districts and Senate races where he loses — do you think it's plausible that Democrats could win one or both seats, one or both chambers of Congress, yet Trump could steal them back for the Republicans?

WLEZIEN: Well, yeah, there are other things too — the redistricting efforts that he didn't really undertake himself, but that he stimulated. So he's pretty close to a full laundry list. What does that mean to me? It means he's concerned about losing. He's accomplishing some of these things — the redistricting, to some degree, though probably not as much as he'd have liked. He probably didn't fully anticipate the countervailing forces that would occur, although the courts have stemmed some of that.
He's lost on other stuff — the mail-in voting is the clearest case. At least on the surface, he seems to be following the rulings. So when he loses, he gets upset, goes on Truth Social and posts, and does things like what we saw with the Kennedy Center. He doesn't have that lever with elections, though — the problem for him is that elections are basically run at the state and local level. That's what this whole court case was about, in one sense: who gets to control mail-in voting, who gets to regulate it in the absence of congressional action? It's still in the hands of the states. Will that always be the case? I'm not guaranteeing you that. [laughs] Does that help, or no?

ROZSA: My question specifically is: could he succeed in stealing the election through any one of the methods I mentioned, or through methods I didn't list?

WLEZIEN: I don't foresee that. I guess it ultimately depends on what happens with the results in the states — whether they're confirmed at the state level, whether people are seated in Congress. So I guess there's a possibility, but I don't think it's a strong likelihood, and he'd have to rely on other people to do it. I don't see how he could do it directly. But there's death and taxes and everything else, I guess. [laughs] And this is one of the other things.

ROZSA: My concern is that he has placed people in positions of power in local and state governments who are believers in his "big lie," who will therefore be compliant in whatever nonsense explanations he comes up with to flip races he actually lost.

WLEZIEN: Well, we'll see. We'll have to see how that plays out. It's pretty clear you hear a lot of rhetorical support for him — obviously in the White House, and the cabinet, those who are left. But down at the state level, a lot of people running in primary elections are going to be with him. How long, and to what degree, isn't clear to me. When you talk about them being "true believers," I'm not absolutely sure we have strong evidence of that in most of these cases.

We'll just have to see how it plays out. I'm not trying to be Pollyannish about it — it's just a big step. Big steps can happen, but it's a big step.

ROZSA: Now I want to go to the issue of polls, because on the one hand, polls can be helpful in preventing cheating by giving experts a realistic barometer of what was anticipated in a given election — if there's too much of a difference between what was anticipated and the actual result, it creates a plausible case for cheating. On the other hand, polls can be wrong. [laughs]

WLEZIEN: Right.

ROZSA: If you look at both older and more recent cases — polls incorrectly thought Dewey would defeat Truman, polls incorrectly thought Clinton would defeat Trump, and more recently polls incorrectly thought El-Sayed would crush Stevens, when he only won by a smaller margin — to what extent can polls be reliably used as a basis for accurately determining an election's legitimacy?

WLEZIEN: Yeah, so some of this is a little deceiving. Most of the national polls were a bit off on Clinton and Trump, but Clinton did win the popular vote, so that part was right — the errors weren't ideal, but that's the tricky bit: in close elections like we've had lately, even small errors can lead you in the wrong direction. Going back further in history, there are other issues at play. I'm not trying to build an ad hoc excuse for that.

But basically, my own research on polling indicates it hasn't gotten worse — if anything, it may have gotten a little better. Despite all the changes in response rates, technology, and weighting, it seems like polls are holding up pretty well. But "polls get it right again" isn't a headline — it's not a good lead, so we don't hear a lot about that. I used to forecast elections myself, and I never heard about it when I got it right, which was pretty much every time [laughs] — except when things weren't quite right, and then people were like, "What happened to you?" [laughs] It's the same with polling generally: the news pays a lot of attention to the cases where they miss.

That said, polls have always had error, and there is something going on with Trump supporters specifically — the polling on them has gotten a little better, though I can't tell you exactly why, because I don't know exactly what pollsters are doing under the hood. Somehow they're weighting things differently, reaching Trump voters they were previously underrepresenting. But they're still coming up a bit short — even in 2024, the very late polls were basically fifty-fifty, and he ended up a little ahead on election day.
It is interesting, because we use things like polls when we talk about elections in other countries too — there was clearly something wrong in Venezuela, for example. The question is whether we'd see a big enough difference in the polls to really say something, and which polls we'd even be looking at. With Congress, there are a lot of races involved in picking a chamber — are we looking at the generic ballot ("which party would you vote for in your House election")? In most House districts we don't have good polls at all.
So it's really hard to match those generic-ballot numbers up against results. You don't expect a 55-45 split in a poll a week out to be 55-45 on election day. I don't know if that helps.

ROZSA: It does, quite a bit. I now want to ask you a question based on an interview response I got from Kyle Kondik [the managing editor of the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ nonpartisan polling and elections newsletter Sabato’s Crystal Ball]. Are you familiar with Kondik?

WLEZIEN: Yeah, I'm familiar, a little bit.

ROZSA: He writes for Sabato's Crystal Ball. I asked him: historically, how have midterms played out under presidents with approval ratings similar to Trump's, and what does that history actually tell us versus what people assume it tells us? His response was: "Generally speaking, a president who is this unpopular should see his party lose a lot of ground in Congress. That said, Joe Biden also had poor approval in 2022, but Republicans didn't do all that well — they flipped the House, but not the Senate. However, the Republican lead in the generic ballot was not as large as the Democratic lead is now." What do you think of his analysis?

WLEZIEN: I've done a good amount of work in this space, and Kyle has too — we've both seen the same data, and that's pretty much spot on. My read on Trump's approval right now is that it's below where Biden's was. But there's also the nationalization of elections, and redistricting, which I think has made it harder to get much swing in seats — unless there's a really big wave. If there's a big wave, it eventually gets deep into the seats, but it's not clear we're going to have that kind of wave this time. It's pretty clear that in 2022 we had the Dobbs decision.

It doesn't look like we have something like that coming down the pike, or over the summer the way we did back then. That's part of what dampened the "balancing" effect — that's the term I use — that we normally see in a midterm. The hard, smoking-gun evidence for that is hard to find, but it looks plausible. We don't seem to have something like that happening now, and we also have fewer competitive districts in play at the margins.

ROZSA: Now I want to ask about whether the midterms can be rigged through methods other than what I've already described. Let me rephrase: you've heard me describe the various things Trump is trying to do to rig the midterms, and it sounds like you're skeptical that could actually happen. What if, hypothetically, the Democrats prevail in all of these races despite Trump seizing ballot boxes, despite Trump using law enforcement at the polls, despite Trump using voter databases to purge certain voters, despite Trump appointing election deniers to key positions at the grassroots level, despite Trump filing frivolous lawsuits — I've listed five things Trump has already suggested he'd do. I'll add a sixth: despite Trump declaring a national emergency. Let's say Trump does all or some of those six things, and despite all of that, the Democrats are still able to flip one or both houses.

ROZSA: Then there's the possibility that Trump has Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune simply refuse to recognize the results. That's a seventh possibility —

WLEZIEN: No — I raised that myself earlier, if you recall.

ROZSA: Yeah.

WLEZIEN: Yes. That's possible — like I said, that's possible. I mean, how would I know? I'm not in the room. Just like everything else you've described, he'd be relying on other people to act as his agents. Will they do that? We'll have to wait and see. He does tend to push things as far as he can, but he also, often, respects court decisions — with mail-in voting, is he going to proceed with that executive action? Looks like not. And how do I know for sure whether he'll do that?

ROZSA: My question is, as a pollster — someone who's an expert in gauging public opinion — to what extent do you think Trump could rig the midterms and get away with it in the court of public opinion? I'm not just talking about —

WLEZIEN: Oh — the court of public opinion? What do you mean, "get away with it in the court of public opinion"?

ROZSA: Right now — do you think the average American would just allow Republicans to retain control of Congress when the Democrats legitimately won? Or do you think, based on your understanding of polls, there would be a persistent and vicious backlash to Trump having done that?

WLEZIEN: My guess is there would be a backlash — there's already a backlash to what he's doing. A number of people attribute his current plight in the electorate to the Iran war and oil prices, but his approval rating was already pretty low at the end of last year, [laughs] before that happened. People were responding to other things he was doing. Should he do this, sure, he'd expect an additional backlash. There's a floor here, though — even Nixon had about 25% approval when he left office. So I wouldn't be surprised if it dropped, but stayed around 30 to 32 to 34.

I'm not sure exactly where it is now — I'm guessing somewhere around 36, 37. So sure, it would drop. But the problem is it's not really in the hands of the electorate. We can express disapproval, and when we get another chance to vote we can punish or reward people accordingly, but in between, we don't have a lot of options. We could rise up, but that's messy. So I'm not sure — sure, the court of public opinion is already disapproving of what he's doing —

ROZSA: All right, that's —

WLEZIEN: — part of the reason he's trying to influence what happens in November. He can say all he wants about polls and people loving him, but his behavior isn't reflective of him taking his own words very seriously. [laughs]

ROZSA: Well, now I need to go back to my earlier question about polls and their reliability. To what extent should the American people trust polls?

WLEZIEN: Well, it depends — what do you mean? They're never perfect, and they're more informative about some things than others. Do you mean pre-election polls specifically?

ROZSA: Yes — or, to what extent should we base our assessment of the legitimacy of the midterm elections on how closely they correspond to the polls?

WLEZIEN: Yeah, that goes back to what I was saying — it's really hard. What are we supposed to be comparing to what? I'd be really surprised if the Democrats don't win the popular vote in a couple months. But let's say they win it, but not by much — I'm not sure what we're supposed to expect based on the polls. If the Republicans won 60-40, that would be alarming.

But we have to keep in mind that some of these states are run by Republican, pro-Trump officials, and others aren't. If we see what we saw in 2024 — a bunch of arrows pointing in a red direction pretty much everywhere — there's less reason for concern. If instead we see a lot of arrows this time pointing blue — some bigger than others, of course, but mostly pointing in the same direction — then I'm less concerned. It's really hard to keep track of everything going on; we have states, counties, cities, and other actors involved in all these elections. It's a substantially federalized, decentralized country when it comes to elections — which is part of what Trump has run into when he goes to the courts trying to get involved with the states too.

President Donald Trump is famously targeting the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by demanding that it be renamed to mention him, despite courts repeatedly ruling that he cannot legally do this without congressional authorization. Yet even as he targets America's premiere cultural center, the president also has another legendary institution in his sights — the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).

Also like the Kennedy Center, USIP is applying for legal relief.

"NOT JUST THE KENNEDY CENTER: U.S. Institute of Peace asks for emergency relief to bar any 'plans to carve President Trump’s name into the facade of the iconic USIP headquarters building,'" Politico's Kyle Cheney posted on X on Thursday. He included a screenshot of a legal filing by USIP in which they appealed to the courts to "prevent Appellants or those acting on their behalf from carrying out plans to carve President Trump's name into the façade of the iconic USIP headquarters building."

The document added, "The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of Plaintiffs-Appellees and granted injunctive and declaratory relief, based on its determination that the United States Institute of Peace ('USIP') does not exercise executive power and that the statutory restrictions on removal of board members are constitutional. Since June 2025, all components of the District Court's order—which it issued in furtherance of its judgment that Appellants unlawfully took control of USIP, disposed of its real and personal property worth millions, and took steps to dismantle the organization—have been stayed pending appeal."

It concluded, "The Court's sua sponte order holding the appeal in abeyance following the Supreme Court's grant of review in Trump v. Slaughter had the effect of nullifying the order expediting the government's appeal in light of the stay, and has now extended briefing for almost a full year beyond the end of the original briefing schedule."

USIP has valid reasons to fear Trump will try to sneak in a demolition or defacing of the USIP building. Experts have warned that Trump plans on demolishing the Kennedy Center if he cannot get his name on it, and he already threw a tarp over the building's entrance to conceal when his name was taken down. He similarly destroyed the White House East Wing without legal authorization in order to build a ballroom. Although he claimed the public wanted this, polls show Americans overwhelmingly oppose the ballroom. After he destroyed the East Wing, the White House received over 9,000 pages of public comments, which were almost unanimously negative.

They included statements like "complete DISASTER,” "NO GAUDY FAKE GOLD STUFF ALL OVER THE PLACE,” “no one wants to be in an adjunct building in a large crowd with lengthened security protocols,” "appalling," "an abomination" and an “eyesore.” A Republican lawmaker, Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, added his voice to the mass protest.

"The stark images of the East Wing demolished in mere days were deeply disturbing to Americans who cherish preservation of our nation's history," Turner told the White House.

President Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to make sure Republican cannot lose the 2026 midterm elections, including by gerrymandering key races so that Democrats are less likely to win those races. In Missouri, this took the form of trying to force pro-Republican maps on the state's House races even after the Supreme Court found that they could not legally do so.

Now, according to a group of MAGA judges, the Supreme Court's ruling saying they cannot legally impose those maps may not literally mean they cannot legally impose those maps.

"Though the high court’s order last week appeared to be the death knell for the GOP-led redistricting measure — once expected to net Republicans one additional seat — a panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals attempted to breathe new life into the issue, suggesting the justices may have been hoping for one more chance to address the matter," reported Politico's Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney on Thursday. Describing the matter on X, Cheney wrote that "like Monty Python's Black Knight, Missouri's redistricting push is not dead yet. A federal appeals court panel says the SCOTUS order that appeared to kill the state's GOP-friendly map might have just been a message for courts to move even faster."

The journalists quoted Judge James Loken, the presiding member of the three-judge panel, who said that the case is “on our plate and I think the Supreme Court has said ‘get to it.’ He added, "So, here we are. They told us: Get to work. Given the election-year pressures and confusion and need for voters and everyone else to know, can we do that? … Can we come to a disposition in time?”

Loken also expressed anger at a lawyer opposing Republican gerrymandering by saying explicitly that he wants to impose the new map by election day if possible.

“You're not going to get a remand so you can write more briefs until the election passes,” Loken told attorney Charles Hatfield.

Cheney and Gerstein reported, "It was not entirely clear whether the two other members of the appeals court panel —Trump appointees David Stras and Justin Smith — shared Loken’s view of the Supreme Court’s action and the urgency of the dispute. Smith, a former Trump attorney just confirmed to the 8th Circuit in June, seemed to be considering a ruling that could complicate future efforts to suspend redistricting pending a statewide vote, but perhaps would not apply in the current fight due to the Supreme Court’s action."

Writing about the Missouri case earlier in September, The New York Times columnist David French warned that Missouri Republicans' seeming determination to gerrymander out Democrats despite the law foreshadows MAGA's larger plans to rig the midterms.

"It’s only September, and America just barely averted the first constitutional crisis of this year’s midterm elections," French argued on Sunday. "Hang with me here because this gets a bit complicated. Last September, the Missouri Legislature passed a redistricting bill called H.B. 1. This bill was part of the wave of mid-decade census redistricting initiated after President Trump essentially ordered the state of Texas in July to redistrict to create more Republican-majority congressional districts and diminish Democratic voting power in the state."

When President Donald Trump betrayed Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) by endorsing his primary rival, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in the latter's ultimately-successful intraparty challenge, experts speculated that the president may have politically hit himself in the face. The reasoning was that Cornyn was both electable in Texas and a diehard MAGA loyalist, while Paxton — though also hardcore MAGA — is weighed down by a number of financial and personal scandals.

Now there is another race that may go to the Democrats because of Cornyn's resentment toward the president, at least if Cornyn's retweeting of a pro-Democrat post is any indication.

On Wednesday night Cornyn retweeted a post of an editorial by Republican consultant Karl Rove which said "Why I'm Voting for a Texas Democrat by @KarlRove." Later he quoted from the editorial in a separate tweet that ”The GOP’s stables need a cleaning. This is a good place to start.“ In response journalist Molly Jong-Fast asked "Are you?" while economist Catherine Rampell posted a pair of interested eyes. The Independent's Eric Michael Garcia asked "Cornyn reposts Karl Rove's op-ed about voting for Rosenthal over Bo French. Sooooo, is Cornyn going to vote for Rosenthal too?"

By contrast, some conservatives were angry at Cornyn. Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson wrote "the sitting 'Republican' Senator of Texas, who lost by 27+ points in his primary, is now telling people to vote Democrat. Spineless. Your own voters rejected you. Now you're endorsing the party whose beliefs are antithetical to what Texans stand for. Pure betrayal. This is why we lose." Similarly right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec commented, "And there it is." Meanwhile former Trump Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Caputo wrote that Cornyn "will not be missed."

Cornyn and Rove are endorsing Democratic Texas Railroad Commissioner nominee Jon Rosenthal over Republican Bo French because French recently posted a racist comment about University of Texas students on social media.

"In one post," recently reported The New York Times' McGaughy. "Mr. French described South Asian students at the school as 'foreigners' who had 'displaced' Americans at the state's flagship university. Mr. French's posts struck a chord in a way his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim comments have not before. The messages threatened to fracture the Texas Republicans' attempts at solidarity and tested their willingness to criticize one of their own — just weeks before midterm voting begins. Mr. French denied his posts were racist and threw the blame back on Republicans who didn't fully support his message."

McGaughy continued, "The posts have also given Democrats renewed hope to win a statewide office in Texas for the first time in a generation. While much of the national focus has been on the U.S. Senate race against Mr. Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general running against James Talarico, state party officials believe Mr. French and another anti-immigrant hardliner, Don Huffines, are particularly vulnerable. The hardliners on the Republican slate may help Democrats in other races as well."