Donald Trump woke up from a nap in the Oval Office this week just in time to remember Vladimir Putin’s birthday. While his own Treasury Secretary was speaking, Trump nodded off at his own event, then perked right up to announce he had a call scheduled to wish his mentor (my word, not his) a happy 74th. By Friday we learned what the birthday boy got. Trump crowed on his Nazi-infested social media site that us taxpayers will buy five million tons of diesel — a deal worth billions to the Kremlin’s deeply troubled war chest — at today’s record-high prices. As a sweetener, a birthday cupcake you could call it, Trump ordered his Treasury Department to suspend sanctions on Russian diesel for the next half-year. And he and little Marco Rubio are going after the International Criminal Court, which has indicted Putin, and are trying to quite literally destroy it. And, shortly, Ka$h Patel will be visiting Moscow.

Bizarrely, this all happened just a few weeks after he signed Lindsey Graham’s Russia sanctions bill. This is the same Putin whose government, US officials have confirmed, is providing Iran with detailed, specific targeting information on American troops, ships, and planes that’s been used to kill our service members. It’s the same Putin Trump’s invited to December’s G20, which he’s holding, corruptly, at his own shabby golf resort motel in Florida. Ukraine, meanwhile, was told no by Trump and Vance (who called it one of his “proudest moments”) when Zelensky asked for Patriot interceptors to stop Russian missiles from daily killing its civilians, a war crime. How much more of this treasonous behavior will the American people, and the congressional Republicans — who swore an oath to the Constitution rather than to Trump — tolerate?

Time magazine interviewed the President of the United States, wrote down twelve things he said, and then had to publish a second article explaining that most of them weren’t true. Raw Story has the rundown. Trump told the reporters he won 86 percent of the popular vote (it was 49.8 percent). He said he’s at 99 percent approval in Israel. He said his convention speech drew 107 million viewers and beat the NFL opener (Nielsen says he had 2.5 million viewers against football’s 25.1 million). He said Iran’s inflation is 300 percent (it’s 83.8) and blamed the American press for the idea that his war would be over in four or five weeks, something he promised in the early days of the war (originally it was going to be “a few weeks”).

Time’s fact-checkers described Trump’s popular vote whopper by gently saying, “He’s conflating two figures.” Conflating is what Grandpa does with the grandkids’ names at Thanksgiving. How much longer will our media continue to tuck his blatant, daily lies into a polite sidebar while the lies themselves get the headline? This has been going on since 2015; no wonder we’re in such deep trouble and our democracy is in such a crisis. Our media needs to grow a damn spine.

Trump’s meme coin buyers have lost 97 percent of their “investments,” so naturally he’s throwing another dinner to sell more of them. As Lisa Needham lays out at Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice, the top 185 holders of $TRUMP will “win” seats at a November 22 gala at his Virginia golf club, complete with a swag bag of Trump cologne, and the four biggest buyers get an 18-karat gold Trump watch. The so-called coin peaked above $73 and now trades around $1.79. Trump is making billions off crypto while the suckers who bought his and Melania’s meme coins were out $3.81 billion by the end of June.

But wait: there’s more! While regular buyers are being told to hold tight for a shot at being invited to this super-special dinner, the coin’s biggest insider wallet has moved tens of millions of dollars’ worth of them into a position to sell. One investor who’s lost $400,000 summed it up, saying, “The grift continues until morale improves.” In fact, there are two kinds of buyers for these “collectible” tokens: suckers and people — including foreigners — wanting to buy influence or pardons from Trump. The Founders had a word for this (emoluments) and so does the criminal code (bribery), and if Republicans in Congress had even the faintest semblance of integrity they would shut the whole grift down tomorrow. Vote!

The bond market, which doesn’t watch Fox “News,” is telling us what it really thinks of Trump’s America. Bloomberg reports that something called the “term premium” — the extra interest investors demand before they’ll lend Uncle Sam money by buying 10-year bonds — has shoved Treasury yields to a 24-year high. As a result, we’re all paying more for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards because America’s lenders (Treasury buyers) don’t trust Trump, Bessent, and the Republicans who control Congress and keep borrowing trillions to give to Trump and his billionaire buddies as tax breaks.

There are energy shocks from Trump’s illegal (and stupid) war on Iran leaving oil stuck above $100 a barrel, as well as a $2 trillion federal deficit just so far this year. This is the end product of 45 years of Reaganomics, decades of GOP lies, and an accumulated $40 trillion in tax breaks for the morbidly rich and giant corporations. We need to tax the morbidly rich like we did when America built the world’s largest middle class, strengthen the social safety net, and stop starting illegal wars that we can’t even afford to pay for.

Somebody seems to have misplaced fifty million dollars, and nobody in Trump’s orbit is in any hurry to find it. A decade ago, Congress set aside money for an America 250 celebration of our anniversary, but Trump ignored that (other than taking the money) and created his own, privatized “Freedom 250” celebration as a new grift to squeeze millions out of major donors like Chevron, United Airlines, and the defense giant RTX.

Now documents uncovered by the watchdog group PEER discovered that the events cost $128 million and at least $114 million of that came from our tax dollars, even though The Wall Street Journal says the “donors” kicked in at least $50 million and (my guess) probably much more. Trump passed out that money to his contractor friends with no competitive bidding whatsoever, and now refuses to say who gave him money, or how much, or even where the money went. Democrats suspect he just turned it into another slush fund for himself and his family; perhaps they should look for piles of cash in the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago?

The people building artificial intelligence are holding private rehearsals for the day it hurts a whole lot of us. Axios reports that top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies are gaming out what happens after a catastrophic AI event, “most likely a cyberattack,” that could knock out banking, the internet, or even power and water. Axios reports that industry insiders told them they expect “something big” within the next six to twelve months.

But when Mediaite dug into it, they concluded that this is really more PR planning than anything else; handling the public and political revolt and a panicked Congress. Trump, who is now heavily invested financially in AI, calls the danger a “hoax” and says the industry should just police itself. You know, like tobacco, asbestos, the Pinto, leaded gasoline, Oxycontin and the Sacklers, and the banks in 2008. That’s always worked out so well for America. Even some Republicans think that’s nuts; there’s already a bipartisan bill requiring a kill switch on advanced AI. Pass it now, while the lights are still on.

Having lost at the Supreme Court, Trump has decided to hold his own trial of Lisa Cook at the White House, with his own appointees as the jury. The Supreme Court ruled against him in June when he tried to fire the nation’s first Black female Federal Reserve governor. So this week he signed a memo creating a “committee of inquiry” made up of his economic adviser, his EEOC chairman, and his ethics director, who will decide Cook’s fate.

As the Guardian reports, she’s being summoned to a kangaroo court that will be closed to the public, capped at four hours, and held on November 5, two days after the midterms, when it’s too late to piss off voters. In an administration that fired the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the first woman to lead the Navy, it appears that her race and gender are her real offense. The Senate confirmed her; the Senate should defend her. But don’t count on the Trump lickspittles and cowards (and probably quite a few racists and misogynists) in today’s Republican-run Congress to do squat.

Hypocrisy Alert! The senator who sued new mothers over medical bills as small as $101 apparently doesn’t pay for his own cookies. Holly Thomas, who owns Holly’s Sweet Treats in Hutchinson, Kansas, says Senator Roger Marshall’s campaign took delivery of $678.75 worth of cookies and treats for his 2020 primary watch party and never paid for them. She’s been calling and emailing Marshall — without any response — as she was then a brand-new business owner trying to survive the pandemic. This is the same Senator/Dr. Marshall whose OB-GYN practice, the New York Times found, sued more than 700 of his female patients — many of them low-income people — and charged them 18 percent interest. He even had 81 of them arrested after missing court dates in those cases. He calls that reporting a “hit job.”

At the 18 percent he charged his patients, Holly’s invoice would be north of $1,400 by now. Congress abolished federal debtors’ prisons way back in 1833, and that principle is supposed to work the same way for a working mom with a hospital bill just the same as it does for a senator with a bakery invoice. But this is Republican-run America, where we’ve got one set of rules for the rich and powerful and another for everybody else. Kansans get to settle this particular account on November 3.

Something stinks.

Astoria is one of my favorites on the Oregon coast, a small town of around 9,000 people with great restaurants and crafts shops. Two of them, a coffee shop and ceramics studio, are owned by a small businessperson, Audrey Long, who’s mailed herself five postcards since August to test the mail. The results have been grim, particularly since Oregon is a 100% vote-by-mail state.

So far, only two of the postcards have arrived, and the first one took more than a month (and Oregon doesn’t even send out ballots until next Wednesday). Across the street from one of her shops the town’s City Hall isn’t getting its mail reliably, either, and the same is true for the tenants of a 40-unit apartment building next door, according to reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is looking into it, his office telling OPB’s reporter, “The timing of these issues is especially concerning.”

At first, I figured this was a one-off; something weird or broken in the Astoria post office. But when I mentioned this on the air Monday of this week my lines were flooded with calls from states across the nation saying that they’re having similar problems with the mail. The calls have continued every day since.

Yesterday, an American listener who follows us on YouTube from Germany called in to say that his ballot was mailed out on September 19th (the law requires all foreign-resident ballots to go out by then) and he’s tracking it online but it still hasn’t arrived at his home in Mannheim.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order limiting who could get a mail-in ballot, that the Supreme Court knocked down last month. But apparently he’s still working on the Post Office, just in some different ways, many of which are being kept under wraps. But there are some clues.

Raw Story’s Alexandria Jacobson reports that nearly 1,000 armed private security guards have been deployed to at least 55 postal facilities in places with lots of Democrats like Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, and Chicago.

Instead of using the Post Office’s own police force, Trump’s people have hired Prosegur, a Spanish multinational armed mercenary force that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund blacklisted in 2024 over what its ethics council called “an unacceptable risk that the company is contributing to serious human rights abuses.”

The company’s also been accused of intimidating union organizers across Latin America, which may be why Frank Albergo of the Postal Police Officers Association worries out loud that nobody from the Postal Service seems to be supervising them. He described the result as “private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control.”

In other words, we’re already partway there: armed men who answer to a foreign contractor and Trump instead of to the public, with no transparency and no clear reason for their being there, are overseeing the buildings our ballots pass through this month.

Then there’s Trump’s wannabe Schutzstaffel of armed, masked, anonymous, unaccountable thugs now equipped with electric gloves that are used for torture in other countries who seems to delight in shooting people — including American citizens like Renee Good — in their cars. Democracy Forward just released 166 pages of internal ICE records they got with a FOIA filing and the result is shocking.

This renegade agency that seems to answer only to Trump and Stephen Miller has now collected 50.6 million voter roll records from the Justice Department.

What the hell is ICE doing with our voter records? And what could their having our personal voting habits possibly have to do with controlling immigration?

But it gets worse: they also got another 48.4 million “voter records” from what the documents call the “independent sources” of election denier Heather Honey, who’s now the Department of Homeland Security’s point person on “election integrity.”

Before 2020, Honey was a private investigator who worked counterfeit-goods cases, with no background or experience in elections or voting machines. She’s an outspoken election denier who still claims Trump won in 2020.

And she’s the source of the false claim that “Pennsylvania counted more votes than it had voters,” which Trump repeated from the stage at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021 which so enraged the mob that then attacked the Capitol, trying to “hang Mike Pence” and ended up causing the deaths of five police officers and the hospitalization of 140 others.

When The New York Times dug into those same documents they found that Homeland Security has already opened investigations into 150 “good government” nonprofit organizations that register voters. The papers show that they’ve considered sending undercover agents into some of these nonprofits to “disrupt activities.”

Trump’s toadies are also seeding the ground with stories that would justify massive intervention in the final moments or subsequent counting days of the election. In July, former plumber and current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed they’d discovered more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls in just four states and threatened to send state officials to jail for even the smallest infractions, if they make any mistakes during this election.

Pretty quickly that number of 250,000 non-citizens on the rolls — widely reported on rightwing media — dropped like a stone. DHS revised their count to claim that there were 185 noncitizens registered in Nevada, one of those four states; when the state investigated, they found that every single one of those 185 people was a lawful citizen.

But if Republicans lose the election this fall, it’s safe to assume Trump will revive that 250,000 number, true or not; he’s never been afraid to tell “truthful hyperbole” (as he calls lying in his book).

Then there are the polling places and the count itself. The Justice Department is dispatching “monitors,” and voting rights groups and local governments are in court right now challenging the administration’s plans to put armed federal agents at the polls and counting operations.

This administration has also joined Russia and Belarus as being the only three countries in the world to refuse to allow in international election monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has overseen our elections for decades. What are they hiding?

And their arrogance is astonishing: when a federal judge recently told a DOJ attorney he’d require advance notice before a state released its “citizenship lists,” the answer, as Democracy Docket reported, was “If you want to enjoin us, enjoin us.”

In other words, like with the East Wing/Ballroom, reflecting pool, Arch, killing people in boats in the Caribbean, or bombing Iran without congressional authorization (or dozens of other examples), “We’ll do our crimes right in the open and get done what we want and you can sue us and yell about it later. We win anyway.”

Like so many of his crimes that he pre-announces, Trump told the Times earlier this year that he “should have” deployed the National Guard in 2020 to seize voting machines in swing states like Georgia.

— He’s falsely claimed that states are mere agents of the feds when they count votes, so the president can tell them what to do and how to do it.

— He mused to House Republicans about canceling the midterms altogether, said out loud that Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least 15 places, and told NBC he’d only accept the results this fall “if the elections are honest.” We all know what that means when a Putin acolyte says it.

— Asked by TIME about declaring a national emergency around the election, he refused to rule it out.

We should take him seriously: he’s already tried to overthrow our legitimately elected government once before.

At 2:24 on the afternoon of January 6, already aware that the Capitol had been breached and violent thugs were searching for the electoral college ballots and terrifying members of Congress, he tweeted that Mike Pence “lacked the courage to do what needed to be done.” To defy the results of the election, in other words. His mob surged and began chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as Trump gleefully watched on TV from the White House.

Most concerning, that year there were still lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department who could tell him no. They’re all gone now, replaced by election deniers, neofascists, and lickspittles.

Speaking of neofascists, the two guys who run his MAGA Inc. $415 million SuperPac spent part of the past few weeks helping a Putin-aligned candidate and party win an election in the Balkans. When the rightwing winner was announced, he profusely thanked Putin for his help and future close cooperation.

And it’s not like we haven’t seen Republicans steal elections before. After Jeb Bush purged some 90,000 mostly Black and Hispanic voters from the Florida rolls just before the 2000 election, his brother “won” by 537 votes. The state Supreme Court ordered a recount and, ignoring the 10th Amendment and the Constitution having given voting to the states, five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court halted the count.

A year later a consortium of news organizations finished examining the ballots and found that if every disputed ballot in the state had been counted, Al Gore would have come out ahead. As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

But that recount didn’t happen because a crowd of Republican congressional staffers — backed up by lawyers Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett who’d come to Florida to help out — held their “Brooks Brothers Riot” pounding on the doors and windows of the Miami-Dade canvassing board until it shut down its hand recount.

And then there’s the purging of legitimate voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — which is where Republicans find their best result. As a Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states with large Blue cities, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.

The Brennan Center added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges double-checked and pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance [Red states] was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [Blue states].”

So we need to be ready for anything from slowed-down mail to bogus lists of alleged noncitizens to Spanish agents with guns overseeing our mail-in ballots.

That’s all the bad news.

The good news is that none of these strategies — which worked great for Republicans in close elections like 2000 and 2024 — can stop a landslide.

If the count is too large to deny or whittle away, we may be able to turn back Trump’s steady and varied attacks on our democracy and our elections.

They’re at it again. The billionaires who own and run the GOP — including the billionaire in the White House and the billionaires in his cabinet — are throwing out another desperate “let’s buy some votes” scheme by sending a million Americans their own money.

According to the White House, over the next few days about a million Americans will get a check for $500 in the mail, prominently signed by Donald Trump, along with a letter telling them a naked lie about it being money Joe Biden kept from them.

It appears this all started when Trump, on September 9th at his “convention” in Dallas, promised to send a check for $5,000 to every American family if only us voters keep Republicans in charge of both the House and the Senate. You vote the way he wants, in other words, and you get paid.

Trump’s problem is that anybody with a memory knows it’s a lie. He promised us $5,000 DOGE dividend checks, $2,000 tariff rebate checks, and $1,500 we were supposed to get when Republicans reconfigured Obamacare, and none of them materialized. Just before the 2020 election he also promised us a $2,000 Covid stimulus check that never came.

And then there were the promises for the 10% rate on credit cards, “1000% cheaper” medications, inexpensive groceries and gas, no more stupid wars, a Trump national healthcare plan, the balanced budget, the Epstein files, and “millions of jobs.”

So, that’s why now he’s cutting these $500 checks for almost a million of us, so his $5,000 check story will sound more credible. It’s essentially the down-payment on a bribe, designed to make people take it seriously.

And one of the really disgusting parts of the whole scam is that he’s also using it as an excuse to take a swipe at Joe Biden based on a lie.

The checks will come with a letter claiming that the Biden administration had “massively overcharged” people who bought insurance on the Obamacare exchange by collecting more in marketplace user fees than they needed, and then sat on the cash. In his video announcement Trump put it this way:

“The last administration knew about this, they studied it, but they kept the money.”

Not only did Trump or his people fail to offer even the tiniest shred of proof of that claim, but health policy experts at KFF say most likely the money came from Trump’s own first term, when his administration collected so much more in fees than it spent that it left behind an estimated $1 billion in unspent funds.

KFF’s Larry Levitt told the New York Times that Biden actually lowered those user fees, but the leftover money that Trump is sending out exists because Trump refused to spend money that was set aside for advertising and for the groups that help Americans sign up for coverage, all because he wanted Obamacare to fail.

In other words, Trump’s so-called “Biden overcharge” is money Trump “saved” by making it harder for average Americans to get cheap health insurance.

The Times also reported that $500 is more than any of these folks could have personally paid in excess fees, and that the liars and hustlers (my phrase) in this administration still haven’t published the actual accounting behind the program.

If this were really about giving back an overcharge, the simple fix would be to lower the fee today and let premiums drop for people on the Obamacare exchanges. That very rational way of distributing the overcharge money, however, wouldn’t put a check in a million voters’ hands just weeks before an election.

And they’ve done their homework on who to target with this free money over Trump’s signature. These are all people who bought their own health insurance through the federal ACA exchange, so virtually all of them must be making under $65,000 a year: think farmers, ranchers, small business owners, hourly workers, and early retirees.

Their insurance costs have exploded by literally thousands of dollars this year because Trump’s Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill let the ACA/Obamacare subsidies expire to pay for a tax cut. Roughly three million Americans were so price-shocked that they simply dropped their coverage altogether (which will show up in premature deaths soon) and, because they’re no longer on the plans, they’ll get nothing at all from this latest Trump check scam.

And insurers are already asking for another 15% increase in Obamacare premiums for next year, as their already-bloated profits aren’t enough and their morbidly rich CEOs need to buy another yacht, trophy wife, or Swiss chalet.

So, to summarize, Trump took money from these families, is handing back five hundred, and wants a thank-you vote from them on November 3rd. And the 30 states where the checks are going just happens to include Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

None of this is new behavior for this billionaire-owned and -run crowd. Elon Musk handed out million-dollar checks to voters in Pennsylvania in 2024, and did it again in Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court race, where a bipartisan state elections commission found probable cause that he broke the state’s election bribery law.

Trump told two dozen morbidly rich oil executives at Mar-a-Lago in 2024 that if they’d throw a billion dollars at his campaign he’d gut any environmental rules they wanted. He’s followed up by paying companies billions to abandon wind and solar projects, increasing subsidies and deductions for the fossil fuel industry, gutting our clean air protections, killing EV subsidies, and reviving coal-powered electric plants.

His Department of Homeland Security then blew $220 million of our money on ads thanking him, and — surprise! — firms tied to his own campaign operatives pocketed at least $23 million in commissions.

This is simply how today’s Republican Party believes politics should work, a belief that’s been ratified by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. Money goes in and favors come out. It’s spread across every major industry in America, as you can see by the parade of CEOs constantly bringing gifts and million-dollar checks to the White House so they can kiss Trump’s you-know-what and shine his shoes.

The oil barons, the drug companies, the banks, and the tech billionaires write the checks, and their obedient Republican politicians write the laws those “donors” want. They’ve lived inside that arrangement for so long that they assume the rest of us operate the same way, and that a voter, like a senator, will leap to respond to anybody who writes them a check.

This used to be a crime. After the robber baron scandals of the Gilded Age, Teddy Roosevelt pushed a humiliated Congress to pass the Tillman Act in 1907 to make it a felony for any corporation to give any sort of support or money to the campaign for any candidate for federal office.

As I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, it started with Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, Nixon putting Powell on the Court in 1972, and then a series of corrupt all-Republican decisions from Bellotti (authored by Powell himself) to Citizens United, to redefine political bribery as “free speech.” Republicans built that pay-to-play system, they use and defend it daily, and now their president is offering it to everyday voters.

A political party that believes votes are something you purchase doesn’t believe in democracy, a system that’s grounded in the idea that citizens should choose their leaders based on what’s good for their families and their country, and that our government works for our people rather than for whichever billionaire or corporate behemoth hands out the most cash.

A party that rejects that idea, and proves it with taxpayer-funded ads, cash-for-control promises, and election-eve checks wrapped in a lie about the last president, has long ago abandoned and forfeited any claim to legitimacy.

If one of these checks shows up at your house, cash it. It’s your money. Then vote like you know who raised your premiums in the first place.

— Six Justices Just Handed Trump a Voter-Purge Machine, but Told Him to Wait Until the Next Election to Use It. Yesterday, the six corrupt Republican ideologues on the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to let the Trump regime go forward with their plan to create a national database of Trump-approved, GOP-approved voters that they intend to then force upon the states in violation of the Constitution. This overturned a June ruling from Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who found the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.”

The GOP’s SAVE database was first built in 1986 to provide information on Social Security applicants and their benefits and Republicans now want to use it to solve the non-existent problem of non-citizen voting. The system is clunky and badly flawed, and, as Democracy Docket points out, naturalized citizens are often latecomers to the system so they keep getting flagged and canceled. Given that the majority of naturalized citizens since we lifted racial/national origin quotas in 1965 have been non-white people, they’re exactly the folks Republicans don’t want to vote, so in the GOP’s way of thinking this is just fine.

Justice Jackson, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, wrote that disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the “nonexistent harm” to a government doing something it likely lacks the authority to do (the Constitution gives voting to the states, not the feds). The unsigned Republican majority opinion — none of the on-the-take Republicans was willing to put his or her name on it — did helpfully note that federal law bars systematic purges in the 90 days before an election, which “limits the potential impact” this year.

Translation: the GOP national voter purge machine is now legal, it just has to idle until the presidential election in 2028, which will determine whether the next crop of SCOTUS nominees will come from a Republican or a Democratic president. Marc Elias called it “a dangerous decision for voters.”

Meanwhile, the same Justice Department is dispatching more than 1,000 “monitors” to polling places in what Harmeet Dhillon proudly calls the “biggest DOJ election observer effort in history.” CNN found that several of the “monitors” DOJ hired during this year’s primaries were Republican partisans who’d helped challenge Trump’s 2020 loss, and one even has pleaded guilty to illegally accessing a government elections website in 2016.

Even Wyoming’s Republican officials complained that the feds’ intrusions into their election systems were disruptive and weirdly fixated on the voting machines. Nothing says “election integrity” quite like sending convicted hackers and Stop-the-Steal alumni to hover over the ballot scanners. Vote early, check your registration, and bring a friend.

— Money In, Regulation Out: How $50 Million Bought the AI Industry a Get-Out-of-Oversight-Free Card. Back on September 11, 2024 the Biden Commerce Department proposed requiring AI companies to tell the government what they’re building and how it’s working. It wasn’t regulation, but it could have laid the foundation for that. Then, as The Lever points out, the checks being written to Trump and his family started clearing the bank and suddenly the proposed rule was simply abandoned.

A company tied to Sam Altman gave Trump’s personal MAGA Inc. SuperPAC $5 million in January 2025; Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz kicked in $9 million that March; Elon Musk added another $5 million in June. In September 2025, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife wrote MAGA Inc. a $25 million check, and — surprise! — less than three months later the rule was quietly withdrawn from the federal regulatory agenda.

So much for the industry’s claims that they want federal regulation; it appears that they just want rules onerous enough to keep out smaller competitors.

In the year since, OpenAI’s own bots broke into the Australian government’s website and, asked what guardrails the industry needs, Trump explained that the only guardrail required is a “strong and smart (High IQ!) president.” So we’re covered, then. This is Roberts’ and Clarence Thomas’ sordid Citizens United legalized bribery system working exactly as designed: the people building the most dangerous technology in human history simply pay $50 million for the privilege of not having to tell anybody what they’re doing with it.

— Americans Feel Worse About the Economy Than at Almost Any Time Since Harry Truman, and Trump Wants to Know Why Nobody’s Grateful. The University of Michigan has been measuring consumer sentiment annually since 1952, and this year came in the second-lowest during that entire history; only Harry Truman was worse, at the peak of the Korean War. In other words, Americans are more pessimistic today than they were during Vietnam, the 1970s oil shock, 9/11, the Great Recession, and even the deadly pandemic.

The reasons are both obvious and subtle: obvious causes include gas and diesel prices spiking because of Trump’s war with Iran, tariffs pushing prices up, mortgage rates are back above 7 percent, and the Fed just raised interest rates again. The subtle reason probably has more to do with Americans realizing — with horror — that Trump and the Republicans have been lying to them for years while feathering their own nests at the expense of the working class.

This is what 45 years of Reaganomics looks like as we approach what may well be the end of the neoliberal road, and as the last bill for trickle-down finally comes due the guy who could do something about it is spending his evenings in his bedroom with Natalie generating heroic AI pictures of himself.

— JD Vance Found 760,000 “Phantoms” on Obamacare. Funny How Many of Them Are Just Poor People. We all buy insurance and we all hope we’ll not need to use it; apparently nobody ever shared that insight with JD Vance or vitamin-hustler Dr. Oz. This week they threw 760,000 people off the Affordable Care Act plans and are examining another 419,000 people, an act they say will “save” America $2.2 billion.

Bizarrely, Oz declared, “These are not real people.” His evidence? About 35 percent of dumped enrollees never used their insurance, which he said was “just not possible.” Anybody who’s ever paid a premium and stayed healthy knows that’s the best outcome any of us can hope for. They’re reportedly using AI to flag these people, apparently looking for minor paperwork slipups, and also going after people in the Red states that didn’t expand eligibility for Obamacare.

Georgetown’s Edwin Park pointed out the whole design is to “make it incredibly burdensome” to stay covered. Nearly 3 million people have already lost marketplace coverage since Republicans let the subsidies expire with their Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare, so they’re just starving it, one “ghost” family at a time.

— Test Scores Hit a 25-Year Low. Trump’s Answer — Just Like With His Economic Numbers — Was to Fire the People Who Count Them. American kids’ reading and math performance has fallen to its lowest point in a quarter century, in part because the federal agency built to help our schools and students has been gutted. When DOGE canceled nearly $900 million in Education Department contracts last year, the National Center for Education Statistics, the agency that produces The Nation’s Report Card, went from about 100 employees to four. It’s now up to a dozen.

Peggy Carr, the commissioner fired after nearly four decades there, says the most painful loss was the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a $47 million project tracking 15,000 kindergartners who started school in 2023, the first cohort born after Covid. Musk’s pimply-faced boys killed it midstream, so the most expensive part of the study had already been paid for but the data is now gone forever. Same story with a study that followed 23,000 ninth graders from 2009 into their thirties, canceled in its final lap. We then had to pay millions in termination fees to the contractors. Now that the main education push from the GOP is to sell vouchers and post the Ten Commandments in classrooms, it’s easy to figure out why Republicans would want the agency that lets us know how our kids are doing to be hobbled or even killed off, as the billionaire wrestling promoter in charge of our Education Department, Linda McMahon, appears committed to doing.

When Trump said he loved “the uneducated” he was dead serious.

— Trump’s FDA Pick Can’t Say Whether an IUD Is an Abortion. That’s Not a Slip, It’s the Plan. Dr. Heidi Overton, the White House domestic policy adviser Trump nominated to run the FDA after Marty Makary bailed, sat before the Senate HELP Committee on Thursday and flat-out refused to answer a simple yes-or-no question.

Sen. Patty Murray noted that last year the administration labeled contraception “abortifacient birth control” while destroying $10 million in contraceptives including IUDs meant for women overseas, then asked Overton point-blank whether an IUD causes an abortion. Overton pivoted to “food safety pillars.” Murray asked again. Overton said she’d be “fully briefed on all their prior decisions” if confirmed. Murray then correctly pointed out that an FDA commissioner who doesn’t know birth control isn’t the same thing as an abortion is “deeply alarming.” With that, Murray was being way too polite dealing with this naked liar: Overton knows perfectly well what an IUD does; she coauthored a 2023 paper for Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute calling the abortion pill mifepristone “dangerous to women” despite more than 100 studies saying otherwise, and she told senators she’s also open to investigating the pill’s manufacturers.

Even Republican Josh Hawley and Republican Chairman Bill Cassidy came away unimpressed.

The theocrats have already succeeded in outlawing legal abortion in half the country; contraception is the their next (and longtime) target, and the way they’ll get there is by installing someone at FDA who’ll “review” the science until it says what these rightwing so-called “Christians” want. Trump went to his Nazi-infested social media site and called her a “ROCKSTAR.” Call your senators at 202-224-3121 and let them know what you think.

— Geeky Science! Your Aging Brain Isn’t Failing, It’s Being Promoted. Every time you walk into a room and forget why, you’ve probably chalked it up to age-related decline in mental faculties, but a new paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science from the University of Arizona argues that’s the wrong story for us to tell ourselves. Drawing on molecular biology and neuroimaging, Fabian-Xosé Fernandez, Sara Burke, and Lynn Nadel propose an “adaptive aging hypothesis”: their hypothesis is that late life is an actual developmental stage, not a slow-motion breakdown.

The hippocampus, the one-day scratchpad in our brain that captures the fine-grained details of an experience, gradually hands off those details to the frontal cortex, which specializes in gist, meaning, and the big picture. A younger brain needs to hoard the day’s details because it has no reference library; an older brain has a vast store of knowledge so instead of noticing details it instead tries to put them into historical context to understand their meaning.

That trade-off, the authors argue, is exactly what makes older adults “wise” and thus well-suited for the traditional elder roles of mentoring, teaching, and storytelling. “If we look at normative aging as a story of just decline, we are really missing the boat,” Fernandez told the Association for Psychological Science.

The Washington Post has a good summary of the thinking. This is a hypothesis paper, not a clinical trial, and the authors point out that Alzheimer’s appears to hijack exactly this transition, giving even more credence to their concept. Older cultures universally respect their “wise elders”; it’s long past time that we stop discounting the wisdom that comes with age.

— Crazy Alert! Trump Posted an AI Picture of Xi’s Arrival and Somehow Lost His Own Wife. On Thursday, as Xi Jinping’s plane landed at Joint Base Andrews, Trump (or Natalie) posted an image on his Nazi-infested failing social media site of himself saluting stoically beside the Chinese president while a bomber roared overhead. The only problem is that the actual video shows Melania Trump and Xi’s wife Peng Liyuan standing right there with them. In Trump’s/Natalie’s version, however, both first ladies have vanished. The one woman who survived the edit is a blonde with her hand over her heart, which set the internet on fire with the theory that Natalie Harp had erased Melania and inserted herself.

Fact-checkers say that the figure in question is actually the chief of protocol Monica Crowley, who posted her own photos from the tarmac, though Aaron Rupar argued her face appears to have been altered to make her look an awful lot like Harp. No explanation from the White House. This is, of course, nothing new for strongman dictators: Stalin routinely airbrushed his enemies out of photographs.

Trump has now repeatedly offered his voters $5,000 checks if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate this fall, calling it the “Trump dividend.” On Sunday he told a rally that it’ll “happen 100 percent” if enough people turn out to vote GOP.

Since his own party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, he could now get an appropriation passed for the ~$1.2 trillion this will add to the national debt; the fact that he’s not doing this is pretty much proof that what’s really going on here is a good old fashioned vote-buying scheme dressed up with some fancy language to make it seem less like the crime it is.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that “if the Republicans win” is quite simply a way of telling millions of Americans that there’s five grand riding on how they vote.

And then there’s Trump telling a crowd in North Carolina that he's not going to send any more disaster aid via FEMA unless they elect a Republican senator. He claims it was a joke, like when he joked about tearing down the East Wing, or building a triumphal arch, or trying to end mail-in voting.

It's really just a variation on the $5,000 check: “Vote the way I want, and I'll make sure you get something; vote against me, and I’ll withhold benefits from you.”

Americans have seen this corrupt movie before, and the last time we saw it we made it a crime.

During the 1938 midterm elections in the midst of the Republican Great Depression, about a quarter of all American families were surviving on paychecks from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program Republicans decried as “communism.” Democrats, though, controlled both branches of Congress and the White House, and more than a few of the local Democratic politicians were willing to exploit that widespread dependence on the public dole.

Reporter Thomas Stokes documented how WPA workers were being leaned on for both votes and campaign contributions; the reporting earned him a Pulitzer. TIME magazine reported that Harry Hopkins, the guy heading up the WPA, was promising both jobs and promotions in exchange for votes, and a Texas Democratic senator investigated, finding similar reports out of Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

The scandal ripped across the front pages from coast to coast, and people were rightly disgusted. Given that a quarter of the population were only able to survive because of WPA payments, the threat to pull them (or expand them) in exchange for votes and contributions seemed like extortion.

So the president’s own party decided to clean up its own act. New Mexico’s Democratic Senator Carl Hatch wrote a bill he titled “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities” that explicitly outlawed government officials from using the power of their offices to influence politics or elections. A Democratic House passed it 241 to 134 and FDR signed it into law on August 2, 1939. We call it the Hatch Act.

Section 3 of the 1939 Hatch Act contained a criminal statute that’s still on the books, only lightly amended, as Title 18, Section 600 of the U.S. Code. It doesn’t begin with “any federal employee,” it opens with “Whoever”:

“Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress … to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” (emphasis added)

A companion law, Section 597, makes it a two-year felony to offer any sort of expenditure to influence anybody’s vote; former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argues Trump crossed that line the moment he made that promise. And, he points out, “if the Republicans win, you win with us” is a clear, neat description of offering a reward for supporting a political party in a general election.

Fox “News” and Trump’s other lickspittles argue that in 1982 the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Hartlage, already said that politicians can make campaign promises involving money because in that case a Kentucky candidate had promised that, if elected, he’d cut his own salary.

But that guy was describing what he’d do to himself if he won the office he was seeking; there’s never before in American history been an offer of cash to voters with a trigger clause that says the money only comes if one party wins and the other loses.

That’s why Republican Thomas Massie said he’s insulted at Trump suggesting his and his constituents’ votes could be bought for a mere $5k, why former GOP Congressman Bob Good called it a “vote-buying scheme,” and why the libertarians at Reason magazine used the word “brazen” to describe Trump’s latest corrupt scheme.

As I mentioned here yesterday, 89 percent of Americans now believe that our government is experiencing “widespread corruption” because for over fifty years Democrats have let Republicans get away with their crimes, including Carter endorsing Ford’s pardon, Clinton’s “look to the future,” Gore’s concession, and Garland’s fifteen-month nap. Every one of those choices by Democrats told the next sleazy Republican that there was basically no price to be paid for corrupting our democracy.

This $5,000 vote-buying scheme and Trump’s FEMA threats are the perfect pivot points for Democrats to highlight how insanely corrupt the GOP has become since Nixon first started taking bribes and selling legislation.

And while Trump has the immunity that six on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court gave him, the people around him who are echoing and promoting these illegal schemes don’t.

Both Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Vice President JD Vance have been out hustling this $5,000 scheme on television, and Section 600 makes it a crime for anyone who makes such a campaign promise “directly or indirectly.”

And the federal statute of limitations is five years, which carries this particular offense out to September of 2031 when it’s reasonable to hope/assume Democrats will again control our federal government and its ability to prosecute crimes.

So, Democrats in Congress need to get ready with subpoenas and serious questions: Who drafted this crazy plan? Who at Treasury and Commerce worked on it, and was it during their government-paid work hours? Did the RNC coordinate any aspect of this? And what the hell is going on with FEMA?

Those are the questions the Hatch Act was written to let us ask.

There are also anti-vote-buying laws on the books in every one of the 50 states and DC, and each state has its own ability to launch investigations, empanel grand juries, and go after corrupt officials. Democratic state attorneys general could, at the very least, begin notifying corrupt Republicans to preserve their records and documents, putting everybody on notice that finally, after all these years of GOP corruption, clean and accountable government is on its way.

Democrats cleaned up their own vote-buying corruption in the late 1930s, and now it looks like they’re going to have to clean up this Republican scheme along the same lines. Let your elected officials know you want Hatch Act and FEMA investigations started on Day One of the new Congress in January.

A July 2026 CNN/SSRS poll found that 71 percent of Americans believe Trump and his regime have not gone far enough to lower the price of everyday goods, leaving the middle class screwed.

A Trump-voting caller to my show yesterday, along these same lines, tried to mansplain to me that things really aren’t that bad, and that the numbers I’ve been using to describe the economic destruction by Reaganism are exaggerated.

For years I’ve been documenting the destruction of the American middle class at the hands of the GOP and neoliberal politicians (including some corporate Democrats).

I wrote about it extensively and did a deep dive into the problem and its causes in my books Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, and, just last month, Who Killed the American Dream?

As a result of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society “socialist” programs, about two-thirds of American families were in the middle class with a single paycheck by 1973 as reported by The New York Times; today that number could be as low as a third of us, depending on your definitions.

And that’s where things get confusing, with statistics flying fast and furious (although everybody agrees Reaganomics has whacked working people), raising the question: What actually constitutes the middle class?

Pew, for example, uses the definition of middle class as people falling in the middle of the bell-curve of income distribution. By that definition, Pew says 61% of Americans lived in middle-income households in 1971 and by 2023 that had declined to 51% of us. This skewing of statistics is driven in large part by the massive wealth being accumulated by a few thousand American families, particularly the morbidly rich billionaire class.

Pew defines middle income as household income between two-thirds and twice the national median, adjusted for household size, and its historical figures are based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data.

But does being “in the middle of the income distribution curve” mean that people in the “middle” today — even if it’s a smaller percentage of Americans — enjoy the same “middle class” lifestyle and opportunities as they did at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution?

This is where it gets sticky. If, instead of defining the middle class as those people in the middle of the income distribution you defined it by what that income buys, an entirely different picture emerges.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in his 1991 book The Work of Nations:

“America has been the first nation in history in which the majority of its citizens considered themselves middle class. … For three decades after World War II, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen.”

Even Pew acknowledged the problem with their income distribution numbers:

“Being middle class can refer to more than just income, be it education level, type of profession, economic security, home ownership or social and political values.”

Two years ago, The Washington Post surveyed Americans about what the middle class meant to them and who they thought was in it. The paper found broad agreement among the majority of Americans who say you’re only in the middle class if you have:

— A secure job (93%)
— The ability to save for the future (91%)
— The ability to afford a $1000 emergency (90%)
— The ability to pay all bills on time without worry (90%)
— Comprehensive health insurance (89%)
— The ability to retire securely (87%)
— A job with paid sick leave (73%)
— The time and money for vacations (67%)
— Own your own home (60%)

By that definition, the Post found:

“Just over a third of Americans met all six [top] markers of a middle-class lifestyle. While about 9 in 10 Americans had health insurance, only three-quarters had health insurance and a steady job. With each added measure of financial security, more Americans slipped away from the middle-class ideal.” (emphasis added)

And, with a nod to the difference between being in the middle of the income distribution and being able to live the lifestyle middle class people could when Reagan came into office, they added:

“Researchers often define the middle class based on income, in part because income data is frequently collected and easy to access. But that income doesn’t guarantee a middle-class lifestyle.”

And then there’s the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. Using the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the Post’s authors doubled down on their assertion that the number of Americans today in the middle class is even lower than the 41% to 47% stat that I’ve been citing:

“Since 2017, the earliest year of comparable data, between 32 and 40 percent of Americans met all six measures, with a low in 2017 and a high in 2021.” (emphasis added)

The Brookings Institution also talks about various definitions of the middle class, one of them arguing it encompasses:
— stable employment
— home ownership
— retirement savings
— ability to weather emergencies
— intergenerational mobility

Depending on the selected definition and using the Fed’s numbers, Brookings calculates that between 23% and 48% of households would count as being in the middle class today.

And the Fed points out that just defining the middle class by a family’s position within the income distribution curve can be confusing and even deceptive. Their Survey of Consumer Finances and wealth surveys show that a family can earn a “middle income” but still have:

— no emergency savings
— no retirement assets
— little or no home equity
— heavy debt

Which is probably why Pew’s earlier work using Federal Reserve data showed that median middle-income family wealth fell dramatically after the Bush Crash of 2008 and has remained far below what previous generations accumulated ever since.

Finally, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines the middle class much as I do, by economic resilience, asking whether families can:

— withstand financial shocks
— accumulate wealth
— afford housing
— educate their children
— retire securely

Their conclusion was straightforward: many households traditionally labeled “middle income” no longer enjoy the security once associated with being in the American middle class.

And that’s also the conclusion of 71% of Americans, according to the new CNN/SSRS poll I mentioned earlier.

Set aside the pissing wars about what is and isn’t the middle class and simply consider Reagan’s war on unions, his slashing top income tax rates for corporations and the morbidly rich, and the Republican Party’s 45-year all-out attack on programs that support the bottom half of Americans.

These GOP policies have ripped the guts out of average American families’ ability to have — even with two full-time paychecks — the lifestyle that the majority of Americans enjoyed with a single paycheck in 1981 when Reagan was sworn into office.

This is what Republicans do, and have been doing since Nixon’s era: move wealth from working class people into the money bins of the morbidly rich. The Rand corporation says it is now over $70 trillion that the rich have stolen from the working class.

Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds.

Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.

It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.

Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.

Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.

The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list.

Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.

Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House.

— Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal just before the election of 1968, an event LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen called “treason” on a phone call that wasn’t released until decades after Johnson’s death. Because the war continued, Nixon beat Humphrey that year by lying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, and an additional 20,000+ Americans and over an additional million Vietnamese died.

— Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to hold the 52 hostages they’d taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the deal destroying Carter’s chance in the 1980 election, and for six years Reagan secretly and illegally sold them American-made weapons in violation of the law. We remember that as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.”

— Florida Governor Jeb Bush had 57,000 mostly Black Floridians purged from the voting rolls just months before the 2000 election, which let his brother George W. Bush squeak by with a 537 vote margin. When the Florida Supreme Court, smelling a rat, ordered a recount, five corrupt Republicans — including Bush’s father’s nominee Clarence Thomas — violated the state’s rights Tenth Amendment and blocked the recount, putting Bush into the White House even though a later recount found that Al Gore had won the election. President Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program: “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”

— And then there was the GOP’s theft of the 2024 election. Greg Palast, a reporter with a masters’ degree in statistics, went through the official state-by-state statistics and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls: 2,121,000 mail were ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were thrown away uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or never processed, and 585,000 in-person ballots were “spoiled.”

He found Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have their mail ballot rejected; Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than 3 times as likely as white people to be given provisional ballots that were never counted. Had that voter suppression not worked, he concluded, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate may well be in Democratic hands.

So, here we go again, only this time state-by-state voter suppression — remember when Texas AG Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon on the air that if he hadn’t blocked Houston from sending out mail-in ballots Trump would have lost Texas? — is getting a big boost from the feds under Trump’s control.

— Trump and his lickspittles have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners so the agency is now functionally dead.

— The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, now run by an apparatchik devoted to undoing civil rights, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison if they make even small errors in running their elections. The DOJ itself has sued more than 30 states trying to seize their voter files.

— The FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence, standing over the process at the personal direction of Trump himself as agents hauled away hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.

— Steve Bannon has repeatedly promised — most recently this week — that ICE agents will defy the post-Civil War federal law that bans armed government officials from polling places.

— And Trump has, on multiple occasions, floated declaring a national emergency or state of insurrection to shut down this fall’s elections, either nationwide or in places where Democratic majorities may win.

Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret.

Trump is now bragging about it, telling Congress that if they pass his voter suppression bill to prevent low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

This is Putin-level corruption, right out in the open, and not a single Republican is pushing back as our national press tries their hardest to avoid discussing it.

We’ve suffered through five illegitimate presidencies in the years since Nixon’s 1968 treason largely because our press has refused to investigate or tell the stories and Democratic leadership has been too timid to bring it up. You know how Republicans would be reacting if the shoe were on the other foot.

This time the press can’t claim they just didn’t realize what was going on, as happened in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024: Trump and his cronies are doing all this right out in the open, and his advisors like Bannon are crowing about it on TV.