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What Trump just approved is already hiding in your grocery cart

In Monday’s New York Times, Eric Schlosser — the guy who freaked out a nation with his book Fast Food Nation a quarter century ago — published an article that kicks off with a simple observation: if you buy a T-shirt at the Gap, federal law requires a label that tells you where it was made and what it’s made of.

While the same is true for your car, your refrigerator, your television, and every apple and bag of frozen peas in the supermarket, as a result of lobbyists being able to openly buy politicians in America since 2010, beef and pork are the exceptions.

Which is why, Schlosser argues, Donald Trump could sign a one-man presidential proclamation allowing roughly 660 million pounds of foreign beef to enter America with neither inspection nor the usual 26.4 percent out-of-quota tariff.

If Americans knew where this mystery meat was coming from, they might not want to eat it, Schlosser notes, but Trump is apparently making sure we’ll never know.

Ironically, the same morning Schlosser was warning us about the incoming meat, Axios reported that the FDA just hit a record 19 simultaneous foodborne illness outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños.

A Cornell economist told them the American food safety system “has gotten hit so hard over the last year and a half.” This is quite simply what happens when you turn a nation’s food supply over to its oligarchs and shut down the regulations that protect average consumers.

Schlosser says much of the beef that’ll be coming into the US could have been frozen for years overseas, blended here with fattier American meat in massive industrial grinders.

Trump refuses to tell us where the meat is coming from, and his Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins — a former rightwing propagandist and fundamentalist Christian evangelist with no food safety background whatsoever — says she’s “not privvy” to that information.

Meanwhile, Schlosser pointed out that Uruguayan beef was recently found tainted with an outlawed antiparasitic drug, Argentine beef has repeatedly tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause nerve damage, and in 2017 Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants over allegations that inspectors and politicians had been bribed to allow rotten meat, chemically treated to mask the smell, to be sold to schools and hospitals and exported abroad.

Will your next burger come from one of those countries? We have some clues.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that on August 20, Joesley Batista, the Brazilian billionaire who co-controls JBS, the largest meatpacker on Earth, met privately with Trump in the Oval Office and made the case for dropping the tariff on Brazilian beef. (Haberman and Swan reported in their book that Batista’s longtime friendship with Melania Trump helped make Trump’s meetings with Batista happen.)

The next day Trump announced his “bring in the meat” plan on his Nazi-infested social media site. His proclamation dropped the entire 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef into the “other countries” quota category, which Brazil dominates.

This is the same guy who, along with his brother in 2017, confessed to bribing roughly 1,800 Brazilian officials to not examine their meat products. Trump’s own first-term SEC and Justice Department fined them and their companies $280 million under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, in part for using bribes here in America to grease their takeover of the American chicken giant Pilgrim’s Pride.

The SEC called their conduct a “profound failure” of corporate governance and had blocked JBS from listing on the New York Stock Exchange for nearly a decade.

Then Pilgrim’s Pride wrote a $5 million check to Trump’s 2025 inauguration — the single largest corporate donation, five times what Amazon or Meta gave — and Trump suspended enforcement against JBS of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Two days after the donation became public, Trump’s SEC also approved the stock market listing, and JBS began trading on the NYSE last June. Now the company’s co-owner walks into the Oval Office and walks out with a tariff holiday on the product his company sells. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been asking pointed questions about the entire sordid deal for over a year.

I spent a couple of decades doing international relief work, living and working in some of the roughest and poorest parts of the world. I was rarely worried about crime; very poor communities tend to police themselves, and they’re especially protective of the relief workers who show up to help.

What I worried about constantly, though, was that I’d eat something that would rip apart my guts or leave me with a brain-worm. That worry was foreign to me most of my life because I’d grown up in an America that had been so horrified by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle in 1906 that we built an entire system to keep our food clean, and every president from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden took care to keep running smoothly and efficiently.

I’d spent my whole life simply assuming that the food on my plate wouldn’t hurt me. Now — much the way I used to look at a plate of food in South Sudan or in the barrios of Bogotá — I can no longer make that assumption. And neither can you.

When Upton Sinclair’s novel exposed the Chicago packinghouses in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt sent in his own investigators with much fanfare from the newspapers. They found that Sinclair’s descriptions were, if anything, conservative, and TR used his inspectors’ report as a moral bludgeon to force the packers to accept federal meat inspectors on the killing floor.

The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both signed by him the same day, gave us the USDA inspection system and eventually the FDA.

Exactly a century and two years later, in 2008, Congress added mandatory country-of-origin labels for meat.

Then in 2010 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery of our national politicians and judges, the meatpackers’ lobbyists swarmed DC, and in December 2015 Congress quietly repealed the labels for beef and pork by tucking that repeal into a 2,000-page omnibus spending bill.

Chicken and lamb still carry the label, but your hamburger doesn’t. The “mystery” in mystery meat was purchased by the industry a decade ago, setting up Trump’s desperate effort to lower beef costs (and screw our ranchers) before the election.

And then there’s Bob Kennedy, the onetime heroin addicted lawyer with no medical or scientific training whatsoever who promised to Make America Healthy Again. In April of last year he announced 10,000 layoffs across federal health agencies, including 3,500 at the FDA.

The Associated Press reported that the fired staff included both the lab scientists who test food samples for contamination and the communications specialists whose job is to alert us, the public, to food safety recalls.

Now, Bob’s FDA budget wants to shift routine food inspections away from the feds and onto the states, all while cutting the agency’s field laboratory operations by more than half. And he’s trying to pull this off at the same time that— under a Republican congress — the federal grants that pay for state inspections today are facing cuts approaching 60 percent.

The results of all this Reaganesque deregulation are already measurable: while in Biden’s 2024 the FDA identified the source of 77 percent of the outbreaks it investigated, in Trump’s 2025 that fell to a shocking 36 percent. This was an agency that had only 443 food inspectors for 36,600 facilities before the cuts began.

And then there’s the rule that would have made it possible for the remaining federal regulators to trace contaminated lettuce or eggs back to their source in hours instead of weeks. Congress wrote it into law in 2011, the FDA finished it as a rule to be implemented in 2022, and it was set to automatically take effect this past January.

But after the grocery lobby complained (and presumably made some well-placed donations to Republican politicians), Kennedy’s FDA pushed that rule back 30 months to July 2028 and Republicans in Congress then threw in a rider that barred the agency from spending even a single a dollar to enforce it before then.

You can see the consequences in the official numbers, which are certainly an undercount as they only represent “reported” cases. As of last week, the Cyclospora outbreak I wrote about in July has grown to more than 18,000 confirmed cases in 49 states, with 990 hospitalizations and two deaths.

And it’s not just pathogens — living organisms — that the FDA and EPA are supposed to be monitoring to keep our food supply safe.

Last week the AP reported that Trump has stalled for nearly two years an EPA investigation into which industries are dumping toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” into our rivers and streams, and how much of the treated sewage sludge containing PFAS’ ends up spread as fertilizer on our farms and thus gets into our food supply.

Welcome to the result of 45 years of Republican deregulation, based on claims that “government is the problem” and “the market knows best.”

When your TV fails, you buy another television, but, under Trump and Kennedy, when the system that keeps your food clean fails, your kid simply ends up in the hospital.

People living in the richest country in the history of the world should be confident their food is safe, and for most of the last century we were. Every president, of both parties, starting with Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, understood that and worked to make it real.

But now it appears that Trump and Kennedy have decided that the Batista brothers’ profits and Republicans’ ability to claim lower grocery prices in time for the election matter more than our kids’ health.

So it’s time to call our senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and tell them to restore mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef and pork, reverse the FDA’s food safety cuts, and fund the “traceability rule” now rather than in 2028.

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Ex-GOP strategist predicts how much lower Trump’s approval will sink

President Donald Trump's approval ratings hit new lows in recent weeks, but as one former GOP leader and strategist explained, there are signs indicating just how much lower it can still go.

Mike Madrid is a former GOP strategist and political director for the California Republican Party. A critic of Trump's takeover of the party, he helped co-found The Lincoln Project advocacy group and continues to speak out against the MAGA movement in various media appearances.

This week, he appeared as a guest for the latest edition of the "Fast Politics" podcast with host Molly Jong-Fast, and discussed the incredibly unpopular moves Trump is making, including his trade war with Canada and real war with Iran, as the midterms are fast approaching. Based on the recent poll results from various sources, Jong-Fast argued that there is "no historical precedent for a president that's unpopular in modern [times]." When she pressed Madrid about whether he was closer to George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina or Richard Nixon just before his resignation, he agreed that "there aren't really historical parallels" for Trump's unpopularity.

Madrid further explained why the situation heading into the midterms continues to favor Democrats, based on the kinds of elections they have come to thrive in.

"Republicans, by their constitution now, are the beneficiaries of high turnout elections because their base has gotten less educated, less informed on issues, and less engaged, lower propensity, as we call them, in the trade," he explained. "Democrats have been winning these lower-turnout elections, which are midterms, and doing better, outperforming because their coalition has become more college-educated, more informed, and more, frankly, more rabid at the idea of getting rid of Donald Trump and the Republicans. So, it begins structurally advantaging Democrats, but then you add on the fact that literally nothing is going well for Trump and the Republicans."

Madrid noted that the poor environment for Republicans can be seen in the fact that Trump appears not to have over a 50 percent approval rating on any issue, giving them little to fall back on with voters. He also stressed the significance of the fact that the number of "people who believe the country is heading in the right direction is sitting at about 24, 25 [percent]."

"So there's a big gap between how people feel [about] what the country is doing, and who he is," Madrid said. "That's an even bigger warning sign, which means there's more floor to drop out as opposed to ceiling to rise."

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GOP verges on 'post-Watergate' approval thanks to Trump toxicity: Republican

President Donald Trump's approval rating continues to find new lows once thought impossible, and as one former Republican lawmaker told CNN, this has made the midterm environment as bad for the GOP as it was "post-Watergate."

On Tuesday, CNN data guru Harry Enten broke down a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, which put Trump's approval rating at 33 percent, compared to a 64 percent disapproval rating, putting him a staggering 31 points underwater, comparable to the worst days for former President George W. Bush. This also marked a major tumble in popularity overall for Trump, as the same poll put his approval 6 points above water at the start of his second term.

"You know, if this were a game of limbo, President Trump would be winning," Enten said. "Unfortunately, this is the game of presidential popularity, and he is reaching record lows yet again. He is losing."

Following that breakdown from Enten, host John Berman discussed the situation with Francis Rooney, the former Republican congressman from Florida who also served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See under Bush. Rooney echoed comments from earlier in the broadcast, calling Republicans "sclerotic," or slow and stuck in their ways, considering that they "will still follow this guy after all the ridiculous things he's done."

"But then, on the other hand, I think they've lost moderates, Reagan, Bush republicans, and that's going to tell the tale when they show up or whether they don't show up; they're going to have a major impact on this election," Rooney said. "We could be in post-Watergate country now."

"You think the environment for Republicans might be as it was after Watergate in 1974?" Berman asked, evoking the time when former President Richard Nixon's scandals soured the country on Republican leadership.

"I think it could be, from what I'm reading about the polls and hearing around the country in different races and things," Rooney responded.

Berman brought up comments from West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice, who argued that Republicans need to pay more attention to the issues, like affordability, that voters really care about. Justice also said that some of those issues have been worsened by Trump's Iran war.

"I think it's a lot broader than just the war in Iran," Rooney said. "I think we have an administration and a president that really don't understand what drives and motivates your average American, your average person, who they don't have any connection with because they're all billionaires. [An average voter] cares about what his groceries cost, his car costs, his gasoline cost and his house mortgage cost. And none of those are going the right way. And they were not going the right way before Iran. But the gas part of it is, is significantly exacerbated after Iran."

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White House insiders fear Trump’s approval could hit the 'scary 20s'

With the United States' 2026 midterms only two and one-half months away, President Donald Trump continues to suffer from weak approval ratings in one poll after another — including 33 percent from Reuters and 35 percent from YouGov/The Economist. But according to Zeteo's Asawin Suebsaeng, Trump White House insiders fear that his approval ratings could sink even lower in the weeks ahead — and that he could become as unpopular as President Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Suebsaeng, in his First Draft column for Zeteo (founded by former MS NOW host Mehdi Hasan), argues, "I have seen a lot of you making the same complaint, and it goes something like this: 'Donald Trump is such a horrendous U.S. president on so many different personal and policy fronts. I know his poll numbers are garbage right now, but how is it even possible that he's consistently clinging to more than 30 percent favorability in the polling? What does a doddering fascist have to do to crack the 20s?'"

The Zeteo columnist continues, "Well, in today's 'First Draft,' I may have a surprise for you: You're not the only ones wondering that. Some very well-connected consultants and Trump whisperers are thinking about the scary 20s, too — and they're not pleased about it. Plus, Trump's DOJ opens yet another absurd but frightening front in his war on his enemies, and the Iran stalemate keeps on stalemating hard."

The burning question with Trump's approval ratings, according to Suebsaeng, is "how low can he go?"

Suebsaeng notes that a recent American Research Group poll found Trump's approval at 30 percent, although he cautions that ARG "doesn't have the reputation other pollsters do."

According to Suebsaeng, "'Republican support for Trump has fallen as Democrats hold a big lead among enthusiastic midterms voters,' said the Economist and YouGov, noting that 'about one-third (35 percent) of Americans strongly or somewhat approve of Donald Trump’s job performance as president.' Private polls commissioned by different organizations and arms of the Republican elite 'aren’t much better,' I'm told by an operative close to the White House who has knowledge of data causing a sustained bedwetting from much of the party that President Trump is going to drag them down hard in the critically important midterms. Of course, one leading cause of these through-the-floor numbers is Trump’s catastrophic war on Iran. The data, and common sense, tell you that."

Suebsaeng emphasizes that for all of his political vulnerabilities — from the Iran war to violent immigration ratings to the economy — Trump's approval ratings from major pollsters have stayed in the thirties, and he has avoided the twenties.

"No matter how unpopular Trump has grown since early 2025," Suebsaeng writes, "conventional wisdom has held that he likely has a floor in the low-to-mid 30s, willing to stick by him through practically anything.… Not that many months ago, it was hard, even for someone like me, to imagine Trump ever again hitting the 20s in a high-quality poll. However mean, horrifying, and pathetic the Trump-Vance administration got, their leader seemed stuck in the low-to-mid 30s, riding a personality cult and a diehard conservative base that loves him or refuses to give liberals the satisfaction of defecting…. But today, keeping every caveat possible in mind, it does appear Trump is trending lower than before, with signs of ever-so-slightly-increasing erosion at the margins of his base."

Suebsaeng continues, "At this point, it is a mistake to brush off the possibility that he could plunge deeper, especially if his Iran war drags on and takes the economy with it ... Trump blundering back into the high 20s in any reputable poll was a prospect that had some practically rolling their eyes in disbelief, as recently as January."

Back in 1932 during the Great Depression, the GOP suffered one of its worst humiliations in U.S. history when President Herbert Hoover suffered a colossal defeat at the hands of the Democratic nominee: New York State Gov. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And a senior Trump administration official fears that in terms of popularity, Trump is sinking into Hoover territory.

The official, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Suebsaeng, "He keeps saying he doesn't want to become Herbert Hoover but then can't stop acting like he wants to be Herbert Hoover. He really could sink to the high 20s, I think. I would not have thought that last year."

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'I feel really duped': GOP in trouble as Trump 'regretters' bail

On Thursday, a new poll revealed trouble for President Donald Trump and the GOP as a large segment of 2024 Trump backers now say they regret their vote. What’s more, a sizeable portion of these “Trump regretters” are “less likely” to vote Republican in the future, fracturing the coalition the party is counting on with the midterms just around the corner.

According to Navigator Research, “One-in-five Americans who voted for President Trump in 2024 now regret their choice.” These Trump regretters fall into a few different camps. The majority are those who voted for Trump thinking he’d be better for the economy than Democrats. Younger voters are fleeing the president, with 30 percent of Trump voters between the ages of 18-34 expressing regret, which is nearly triple that of Trump voters over 55 and well above Trump voters ages 35-54. About a third of Black and Latino Trump voters are regretful, which is double the rate of white Trump supporters. A quarter of independents and non-MAGA Republicans who voted Trump fall in the regret camp, including 37 percent of independent men, as do 22 percent of Trump-voting moms.

What’s more, Trump regretters are more likely to have a negative view of the economy versus Americans overall. As Navigator explains, “Americans across the board are souring on the economy and current administration, but this sentiment is especially shared by those who now feel remorse for their 2024 vote. Four-in-five (81 percent) Trump regretters rate the economy negatively, eight points higher than Americans overall (73 percent). Additionally, Trump regretters are feeling more down about their personal financial situations, with nearly seven-in-10 (69 percent) feeling uneasy, six points higher than Americans overall (63 percent).”

“All our prices have gone sky-high for necessities,” said a white woman from Arizona who voted Trump. “Our utilities have raised, our mortgage, the interest rates, the food in the grocery store. Everything has gone up except my wages, and it’s making it harder and harder to make ends meet.”

Generally speaking, notes Navigator, “Trump regretters are deeply dissatisfied with President Trump’s second term so far. Three quarters (74 percent) of Trump regretters disapprove of President Trump’s job performance, compared to 60 percent of Americans overall. Nearly four-in-five (77 percent) also disapprove of his handling of the economy, compared to 63 percent of Americans overall.” Regretters are also deeply negative on a number of specific economic issues. According to Navigator, “83 percent disapprove of President Trump’s handling of gas prices, eight points higher than Americans overall. 77 percent disapprove of President Trump’s handling of healthcare, 15 points higher than Americans overall. 74 percent disapprove of President Trump’s handling of foreign policy, 14 points higher than Americans overall. 83 percent disapprove of President Trump’s handling of grocery prices, nine points higher than Americans overall.”

As Navigator explains, “Like Americans more broadly, Trump regretters want the president and Congress to focus on inflation and the cost of living, jobs and the economy, and healthcare. Instead, they see President Trump and Republicans in Congress prioritizing foreign conflicts and immigration, rather than helping Americans make ends meet.”

“The main [disappointment] to me would be the focus and the promise on getting rid of inflation,” said one Georgia Turmp Regretter. “That’s very disappointing because we’re all still struggling.” As another from Nevada said, “[Trump] stated you’ll see prices go down in the grocery store because inflation’s under control … No. If anything, things have become more expensive.”

There are several key reasons regretters say they’re disappointed in Trump. 30 percent say it’s because of his broken promises, 27 percent don’t like the war, 25 percent noted cost of living, and others said that he is a bad person who “only cares about himself,” and that he “has made things worse generally.” According to Navigator, “Nearly half (45 percent) cite the war with Iran as a main reason for regret, as well as prices and the cost of living (43 percent), healthcare cuts (38 percent), and focusing on the wrong priorities like the White House ballroom (36 percent).”

“I feel really duped,” said one Trump voter from North Carolina. “I voted for him because I was expecting him not to go to war. And then he’s going to war everywhere and in America.”

All of this is bad news for Republicans who are already panicking about their chances in the midterms. According to Navigator, “Nearly one-in-10 (8 percent) Trump voters say they no longer support President Trump and would change their vote if they could. This includes 26 percent of Democratic or Independent Trump voters and 12 percent of non-MAGA Republican Trump voters who would now change their vote.”

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'We have a sick country': Conservative analyst unloads on MAGA

On Friday, a leading conservative political analyst revealed what he really thinks about President Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and their MAGA voters, declaring that Trump’s cultish following has resulted in a “sick country.” This is according to Tom Giovanetti, president of the prominent conservative think tank the Institute for Policy Innovation, who took to social media to share his ire toward his colleagues on the political right.

“Why do we have a lousy economy?” posted Giovanetti. “1. We have a lousy economy because we have a sick country. 2. We have a sick country because we tolerate a president focused on his hobbies, his enrichment and his pet peeves rather than his duties as president. 3. We have such a president because we have a Republican Congress more concerned about being known for their slavish devotion to said president than performing their duties as a legislature. 4. We have such a Congress because Republican primary voters are more slavishly devoted to the president than they are to the nation or to their children and grandchildren.”

Giovanetti included a final point, asking, “And ya’ll want me to vote for Ken Paxton?” This is in reference to MAGA senatorial candidate and current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fierce Trump loyalist whose career and campaign have been characterized by fraud, bribery, obstruction of justice, and other scandals. Paxton is currently trailing behind Democratic candidate James Talarico, which has many on the right worried that the Texas seat could flip blue -- a situation that some conservatives forecasted when Trump-endorsed Paxton won his primary against Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who they argued would be more broadly popular in the general election. Giovanetti has blamed the state GOP for the potential upset, "because the Texas Republican Party nominated Paxton, in full knowledge of all of his failings and deficiencies."

An outspoken critic of the Democrats as well as former Presidents Obama and Biden, Giovanetti can hardly be accused of being from the “communist” left as Trump so often labels those who challenge him. Giovanetti’s reference to the "lousy economy" comes on the heels of a “bleak” jobs report from the Labor Department, which found that the country shed 23,000 jobs in July while downgrading estimates for the previous two months by 100,000.

According to Navy Federal Chief Economist Heather Long, “This is a bleak jobs report. The U.S. labor market is stalling again and that is going to make the Federal Reserve’s job harder and life for job seekers rough. The big surprise was job losses in July. But that was only the beginning of the bad news. The unemployment rate fell for the wrong reasons. People continue to leave the labor force. Labor force participation is at the lowest level since February 2021. Even worse is that wage growth cooled to a mere 3.2 percent, the lowest level in five years. This is not what workers need as inflation soars again.”

“The ‘Golden Age’ is apparently a mirage,” snarked Andrew Eastmond of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “Who knew?”

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Trump’s new 'power move' sparks direct outrage from the GOP

In yet another would-be power move, the Trump administration has rescinded spending a billion dollars already approved by Congress – towards assuring to protect undocumented immigrants and unaccompanied children in court.

Using a process known as “pocket recission,” Donald Trump’s office of management and budget has refused to spend the money, insisting that there is no problem worth spending on because the administration has reduced illegal immigration to zero.

“These funds previously went to pro-illegal immigration programs and Non-Governmental Organizations that provided services to refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens and put unaccompanied children in harm’s way,” the White House explained. The decrease in border crossings meant funding toward these programs became excessive, warranting their recission.

Trump’s bureaucratic move, less flashy than some of his recent projects, sounds as if it is based on contempt for any positive help for young, unaccompanied migrants whom he is seeking to arrest, detain and deport as quickly as possible, so there are obvious policy questions here. There seem to be an unending supply of border agent grabs of young, unaccompanied migrants whose treatment at the hands of border guards consistently reflect formalized cruelty, lack of representation and minimal health and education standards.

But whether justified or not on substance, once again we are forced to view this action on the continuum of the slide towards total control of government and a stomping on Constitutional balance-of-power concerns. In that context, the “pocket recission” takes on a different meaning. Even to the extent that stepping on Congress’ powers of the purse are close legal questions, this one happens to violate the time limits established for such procedures. The only way to see Trump’s desire to usurp Congress’ role is through his authoritarian bent.

Even Senate Republicans, including Sen. Susan Collins, R-Me., was calling the move “unlawful,” and vowing Senate action to stop it. It also seems silly. With Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress, Trump should be able to get a congressional vote to achieve what he wants in spending.

But as with declaring war or not with Iran but allowing U.S. troops to participate in conflict without a Congressional vote, this Congress is moribund by choice – underscoring some of the voter anger about failures to act about high prices, tariffs, turns against international allies and the excesses of deportation.

Other cuts of funds being sought by Trump reflect his anti-DEI agenda. OMB wants to forgo spending on HHS gender-affirming care research, minority business development and the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Services, which the White House said promoted identity-conscious law enforcement practices. The administration described these initiatives as “wasteful and harmful.”

Trump last used the same tactic in 2025 to cut roughly $5 billion in congressionally approved funding. The Supreme Court voted at the time to allow the Trump administration to keep the money that was set to expire the following week.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

A lone top Republican urges party to forgo Trump’s giant arch

President Donald Trump's decoration projects rely heavily on congressional approval for funding, but that appears to be coming to an end.

While Trump claimed he would fully fund his ballroom project through donations, he has failed to secure the financing and has begged Congress for the cash, saying the ballroom is now a military center. The next move is to do the same with an arch, and Politico reported that at least one Republican isn't buying it.

The 25-story arch with a flame atop it will stand between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, blocking the view of the soldiers buried there.

While the arch was once supposed to have an "observation deck," it will now become a "military complex" with "snipers and drones," the president said over the weekend.

The White House ballroom that Trump claims will also be a military complex with a drone pad atop the room is less than four miles from where the arch will be built. The Pentagon and Fort Myer are even closer, and both are protected by a multi-layered air defense network covering the National Capital region. The network involves a national advanced surface-to-air missile system, quick-response helicopters and jets and even short-range mobile air defense systems, according to a 2002 press release about the new defenses in place after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson isn't keen on the idea.

“There’s a lot of things that we need the military funding for — in fact, we’re short on military funding right now,” Simpson told reporters while at the Capitol on Monday.

“If it was my choice, I wouldn’t put any of that money into the arch,” Simpson said.

When he was asked whether Pentagon funds should be funneled into the project, he said it's "something that needs to be debated." However, he added, there are other DoD projects that should take priority.

“I hope if they decide to do it, that they would come to Congress and ask for an appropriation for it if they’re going to use appropriated dollars to do it,” Simpson said.

Trump has come up with a way to spend funds at the Pentagon that were not allocated by Congress through a special memo from the general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. The memo claims that, thanks to the "Defense Production Act and annual defense legislation from 2017," and Article II of the Constitution, Trump, not Congress, has the ultimate authority on all military spending.

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The floor just collapsed under Trump as approval from longtime supporters slips

According to a new poll, President Donald Trump is losing the support of his most essential voting bloc fast, as his net approval among men has plunged from -13 to -19 in just one month.

The six-point decline was revealed in a Focaldata/Financial Times survey, and it represents a dramatic loss of ground among the very voters who put Trump in office in 2024. According to Newsweek, “He won male voters by 12 percent over then-Vice President Kamala Harris, making them a cornerstone of his electoral coalition, data from Pew Research Center shows…It also fits into a broader pattern of slipping approval for the president.”

What’s more, the new poll “found Trump's overall approval at 34 percent versus a 57 percent disapproval rating, while recent polling has shown growing voter dissatisfaction over the economy, inflation and the cost of living, issues that consistently rank among Americans' top concerns ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.” As the survey itself notes, “President Trump's net approval rating has reached an all-time low of -23, with the share of Americans disapproving of his performance rising for the fourth consecutive month to 57 percent.”

Approval for Trump has also continued to slip in specific areas where he was once considered the strongest. On immigration and border security, for example, his approval is just 41 percent versus 46 percent disapproval. On inflation and cost of living, his approval is a mere 20 percent, with 67 percent disapproval. And when it comes to jobs and the economy overall, just 29 percent approve of his performance while 56 percent disapprove.

Polling earlier in the year had already showed that Trump was slipping with men, though his male voters were remaining more loyal than his female supporters. As Newsweek notes, “The latest Focaldata results indicate that even one of the president's most reliable constituencies could be showing signs of erosion.”

This latest poll comes on the heels of the release of a survey showing that Trump is losing another group that was key to this winning 2024 coalition: the Reluctant Right. Making up roughly 20 percent of his electorate that year, this group is comprised of voters who only cast for Trump because they didn’t like Kamala Harris, 38 percent of whom say they will vote for Democratic or otherwise non-Republican candidates in the midterms, while the survey director forecasts that a sizeable portion beyond that will skip voting altogether.

Trump’s downward slide with the Reluctant Right has been largely driven by younger voters who have been angered by the Epstein scandal, the disastrous war with Iran, and the crumbling economy.

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GOP strategist warns 'bottom is dropping out' as Trump faces 'wipeout'

President Donald Trump is now in the final phase of his midterm campaign, even as his approval rating drops and Republican strategists grow more worried about the party losing ground in both houses of Congress.

Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist who was in the first Trump administration before leaving following the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, stated to The Atlantic that Trump has given GOP candidates “no results to point to, no agenda to promise either.” Bartlett said many Republicans now believe “the bottom is dropping out and a wipeout could be coming.” He added: “Many recent elections have broken late, and hard, and often in one direction only. Among Republicans there is little hope that things get better before Election Day, but grave concern they may get worse.”

The warning comes as Trump's approval rating has dropped to 37 percent, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll, making it the lowest level recorded by that poll for an incumbent president facing a midterm election since 1990. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last month, the president also hit a record low of just 32 percent.

The Republicans also have competitive Senate races in states that were thought to be much safer for the party at the beginning of this year. Trump is set to campaign in Ohio, where the Republican senator Jon Husted is running against the former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown. Races are also underway in Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Kansas and possibly Nebraska among the seats that the Republicans hold.

Trump will start his campaign activity in October with a series of appearances in Oklahoma and Alabama before going to Ohio despite the fact that neither state has a Senate race that is particularly close.

The White House has dismissed the idea that Trump has become a drag on the Republican candidates. Davis Ingle, who is a spokesperson for the White House, told The Atlantic that President Trump is the clear leader, the best communicator and the unmatched motivator of the Republican Party and that he is determined to keep Republican majorities in Congress.

The republicans have also demonstrated a tendency to be moving away from Trump on matters such as immigration enforcement and the ongoing conflict in Iran. Some republicans have criticized the administration for using taxpayer money for what critics have called an effective Trump campaign advertisement, and some aides in his inner circle have reportedly called the ads illegal.

Trump has continued promoting various proposals and initiatives, including those related to artificial intelligence, and has promised $5,000 payments to each adult citizen if Republicans stay in power in November. However, since early voting has already started in a number of states, Republican strategists quoted by The Atlantic state that the party does not have much time remaining to alter the political situation before Election Day.

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Trump's dead-enders are trapping the GOP in a toxic strategy

As the November 2026 midterm elections approach, Donald Trump's broader political coalition has suffered severe erosion, revealing deep fissures within the electorate and creating a unique psychological phenomenon that defies standard political gravity.

An October 2026 national survey from the Pew Research Center reveals his national approval rating has plummeted to 30 percent, with a staggering 68 percent of Americans disapproving of his job performance. A separate Reuters/Ipsos Poll similarly placed his overall approval at a career-low 32 percent, driven by widespread public dissatisfaction over the cost-of-living crisis, soaring fuel prices, and the prolonged Iran war. Despite this collapse among independents and swing voters, a significant portion of the Republican campaign apparatus continues to cater aggressively to Trump's core "dead-ender" base.

This unshakeable core of remaining support functions less like a traditional voting bloc and more like a political fortress, completely insulated from day-to-day economic anxieties.

This demographic stronghold is constructed from deeply entrenched cultural, religious, and generational identities, particularly older, white, and non-college-educated working-class voters who view the political landscape through an existential lens. To them, the media's talk of plummeting approval ratings is not an objective warning, but rather an invitation to dig in their heels. They perceive progressive shifts in education, public institutions, and corporate culture as a direct threat to their way of life, viewing Donald Trump not merely as an executive tasked with managing inflation, but as an indispensable cultural shield.

Consequently, economic downturns do not break their loyalty—instead, they reinforce the belief that they are participating in a critical defense of traditional American identity.

Crucial to sustaining this internal environment is the echo chamber constructed by conservative media networks, which actively fuels this sense of base defiance. In a striking shift, mainstream news executives have implemented high-stakes programming decisions to stop broadcasting the president's campaign rallies live in full, as documented by CNN and detailed in a Yahoo News report.

Yet while the network's daytime coverage has begun to tune him out due to his low poll numbers, prime-time opinion hosts continue to validate the base’s intense siege mentality. Right-wing commentary frames the national polling collapse, mainstream media criticism, and economic volatility not as administrative failures, but as a coordinated assault by political elites against everyday conservatives. By continually filtering real-world economic hardships through the lens of a relentless culture war, these networks ensure that the base views any drop in Trump's public standing as an existential crisis requiring absolute solidarity rather than political reevaluation.

This intense devotion creates an extraordinary dilemma for Republican politicians fighting for survival. From a purely mathematical standpoint, catering to an increasingly isolated, low-approval populist wing risks alienating the vital moderate and independent voters needed to win general elections. Yet, from a structural standpoint, breaking with Trump invites immediate political execution from a hyper-motivated base that completely dominates primary turnouts.

While a Politico-PF Global poll published by The Hill indicates that 26 percent of Trump's 2024 voters believe Republican candidates should break away to win the midterms, a deep-dive analysis by Politico highlights that the remaining vast majority of core MAGA voters demand absolute alignment. Republican strategists worry that any public criticism of Trump will alienate these high-enthusiasm loyalists, depressing the vital voter turnout required to protect vulnerable congressional seats.

To navigate this tension, many Republicans are shifting away from defending tangible economic outcomes and are instead focusing heavily on cultural grievances that animate the core base, such as border security and progressive social policies. They are also utilizing a delicate double-game to validate the base's belief that Trump remains an unblemished champion, often shifting the blame for the affordability crisis away from the president and onto his advisers.

The party is simultaneously relying on structural advantages like redistricting and a massive fundraising edge to preserve narrow congressional majorities, calculating that intense base mobilization can outpace a toxic national environment where generic ballots strongly favor Democrats.

This high-stakes tension is playing out directly across several critical 2026 battleground states. In Kansas, incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall accepted a full endorsement from Trump and continues to run on core MAGA themes to shore up his right flank despite a shifting political landscape. In Ohio, Republican nominee Jon Husted is locked in a tight battle against Democrat Sherrod Brown, choosing to double down on motivating high-enthusiasm cultural conservatives and white working-class voters rather than pivoting to the center. Meanwhile, Iowa highlights the severe drag Trump's low ratings place on otherwise favored candidates, as Republican Ashley Hinson is feeling the squeeze in her matchup against Democrat Josh Turk but avoids breaking with the president’s platform for fear of losing the enthusiastic 30 percent base.

The pressure to cater to Trump's unshakeable core is equally intense in competitive House contests across the country. According to a voter enthusiasm survey reported by The Hill, even vulnerable GOP lawmakers in purple districts are actively welcoming the president to campaign for them. While conventional political wisdom suggests distancing from an unpopular administration, a multi-district review published by The Independent shows that candidates are caught in an intense balancing act. Ultimately, many campaigns are betting their final political survival on the unshakeable enthusiasm of Trump's remaining loyalists, even if it risks alienating the moderate majority.

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