President Donald Trump's latest midterm rally caused major alarm after his remarks about major cities being destroyed, and as former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta argued, these "dangerous and insane" comments show that he is fully descended into "desperation mode."

During a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, this week, Trump attempted to persuade voters that the major inflation caused by his war with Iran was worth it. As he made his pitch, he jokingly suggested that he would be fine with it if Iran attacked and wiped out Los Angeles and San Diego, two major West Coast cities in California led by Democrats, calling it a fair price to pay.

"It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe,” the president said. “They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over very soon. It's essentially almost over with, and they might keep going a little long. You know, they always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it.”

Acosta appeared as a guest on the latest episode of the "Fast Politics" podcast, where host Molly Jong-Fast asked for his reaction to Trump's alarming rally remarks.

"It sounds like we have a 25th Amendment crisis in this country," Acosta said. "He absolutely stepped in it big time... There are unhinged and deranged comments that he makes from time to time, [but] I mean, this is as bad as it gets. This is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff to say that, well, you know, we have to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon, or else, you know, they could take out LA and San Diego. Why is he singling out these two cities, and why is he going after California? It's always, you know, he always goes after blue states. And, you know, to suggest, to fantasize about two massive American cities, any American city, being taken out by a nuclear weapon, to me, is just, it's as dangerous and insane as it gets."

Acosta later argued that all of Trump and the GOP's attempts at "monkeying" around with supply chains and gas taxes in a scramble to lower gas prices before the midterm elections will not possibly be able to "bail them out" in time. With that in mind, Acosta added that he has "seen [Trump] in this mode before," where he and all the people around him are getting "frantic."

"They go into desperation mode, and you can see it at these rallies," Acosta explained. "It's why he is coming unglued. He sees what is [coming]... It's like that giant wave in [the film] Interstellar that's way off in the distance, and it looks like a planet killer, and he sees that Interstellar wave coming, and he is so freaked out that they're trying to get the hell out of there in time. And I'm telling you, this is just the beginning of the desperation stage. These next four weeks are gonna be one hell of a ride because he knows..., if it's as bad as it sounds right now, where they lose the House, they lose the Senate, the polls are correct, they lose these important governor's races, and, like Florida and Texas, that's a historic blowout. We've never seen a midterm blowout like the one that is taking shape right now."

As President Donald Trump gets back on the road to host political rallies across the country, he is running into a "new, very embarrassing problem," and according to a new piece from The i Paper, it is an issue that also foretells the death of his MAGA movement sooner than expected.

In recent weeks, Trump has been making numerous rally appearances in safe red states, hoping to stave off the worst-case scenario for Republican losses in a midterm blue wave blowout, where Democrats appear to have serious momentum in states where they are not normally competitive. Despite passing through red states that he won handily in 2024, such is Trump's diminished popularity that he is being met with a problem that cuts straight to his attention-staved ego: a noticeable number of empty seats at his rally venues.

Writing for The i Paper on Monday, columnist James Ball dug deeper into this growing new issue for Trump, noting that his boasts about the venues being packed to the rafters are looking increasingly pitiful in the face of reality.

"As the camera panned around the San Antonio’s Freeman Coliseum as Trump spoke earlier this month, anyone looking at the crowd would see the upper tier was sparsely populated," Ball wrote. "Trump himself noticed from the podium, blustering to explain away the gaps like a schoolchild claiming they really did have a girlfriend, only she goes to another school. In Canada... Even this was better than Trump’s rally in Kentucky, a state he won by 30 points, on Saturday, where the entire upper level of the arena was left completely empty, leading the New York Times to note a comment from an anonymous staffer, who 'said they had expected a larger audience than was on hand.'"

He added: "Rallies are not attended by floating voters or people who vote for the lesser of two evils – the people who go to these events know that they will be queuing up for hours, will have to go through security screening and then will have to wait again for Trump to start speaking. Given Trump’s meandering speaking style, that might take hours, too."

Ball argued that these thinning rally crowds seem to back up the idea that has emerged in certain polls, that a notable segment of Trump's MAGA base is starting to abandon him. The trend is certain to hit Trump's ego, as he has in the past boasted about selling out massive venues with the same passion that he usually reserved for boasting about his ability to pull TV ratings.

Beyond just his ego, though, Ball suggested that the trend sends a chilling message to the GOP about the sturdiness and longevity of the MAGA movement overall.

"Few things will hit Trump harder than the idea that he can’t thrill a crowd of his supporters any more," he concluded. "But those who wish to succeed him as president will be taking notice: if Trump can’t pack out an arena any more, perhaps the MAGA coalition won’t outlive the Trump presidency, after all."

President Donald Trump is very popular in Oklahoma — and that explains why it's so ominous for Republicans that he recently campaigned there.

"President Donald Trump’s unusual decision to hold a midterm rally in a rural part of Oklahoma, a state long considered a Republican stronghold, signals GOP panic that voters may sit out the election as the president’s popularity wanes," reported News from the States' Emma Murphy on Monday. "Political scientists said Thursday’s campaign rally in Durant, a city of about 21,500 people located about 2.5 hours southeast of Oklahoma City, also underscores GOP concerns that a Trump endorsement has decreased in value."

Murphy added, "Trump’s first official appearance in the state in six years also comes as a state party leader said Democrats nationally are putting resources into flipping an Oklahoma City-area congressional seat that has been held by Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice since 2021."

Seth McKee, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University, told Murphy that “I think it’s a signal of how bad things have gotten for the Republicans under Trump." Describing Trump as "toxic" to Republicans seeking office, he continued that "he doesn’t hurt in Durant, Oklahoma, but he might be a net negative if he went down to Dallas and campaigned for Ken Paxton… So that’s what we’re dealing with here, which is a real problem. I mean, he’s so unpopular that if you put him in any context where a race is super close, he’s not going to help it, he’s going to hurt it.”

Trump is facing headwinds going into the 2026 midterm elections for a constellation of reasons involving both his own unpopular policies and historical precedent that works against the incumbent party in such contests.

Speaking with AlterNet earlier in September, Sabato's Crystal Ball editor and polling expert Kyle Kondik explained all of these issues.

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

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

Everywhere he goes on the campaign trail, Trump is telling Republican voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”

He’s not, of course, but his approval rating is so low that telling voters to “pretend” he’s on the ballot is backfiring big-time.

Which is why so many Republican candidates are trying to distance themselves from him. They’re not mentioning his name. They’re not talking about his policies. They avoid the word “MAGA.” A dozen have removed his name, image, or endorsements from their campaign websites.

They don’t want to appear with him. When Mike Schrimpf, a spokesman for John Sununu’s Senate campaign, was asked why Trump isn’t campaigning with Sununu, Schrimpf limply explained,“John’s focus the entire campaign has been on New Hampshire, and [he] doesn’t plan to campaign with anyone from outside New Hampshire.” Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins told The New York Times she has no plans to campaign with Trump.

Several prominent Republican candidates are openly criticizing Trump. Michigan’s Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers released a direct-to-camera ad that takes on Trump’s trade war with Canada. “Here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy,” Rogers says, holding a can of the Canadian-brewed beer Labatt. “We need to end this tariff war — now.”

Yet Democrats in key battleground states aren’t letting their Republican opponents get away with distancing themselves from Trump. At last week’s Senate debate in Maine, Troy Jackson accused Susan Collins of failing to oppose Trump’s war in Iran and his tariffs. “We are in a crisis now because she wouldn’t stand up to Trump.”

In last week’s Georgia debate, Jon Ossoff tied his Republican challenger, Rep. Michael Collins, to Trump — charging that “Whatever Donald Trump says, Mike Collins does” and at one point even calling Trump’s tariffs the “Mike Collins Donald Trump tariffs.”

In last week’s Michigan debate, Democrat Dr. Abdul El-Sayed accused his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, of being a “sock puppet” for Trump.

The more voters “pretend” Trump is on the ballot, the better for Democrats.

Yet I doubt Trump cares. He isn’t really campaigning for Republicans anyway. He’s campaigning for himself.

His “midterm convention” in Dallas at the start of September — invented by Trump to kick off the campaign season — was little more than a pep rally to glorify himself. His photographs covered the walls of the arena where the Dallas Mavericks play. His face was even plastered on coffee cups, in elevators, over mirrors in lavatories.

His endorsements of Republican candidates have been laced with self-absorption. When asking South Carolinians to vote for Darline Graham for the Senate, for example, he recounted that his “dear friend Lindsey” always told him Darline was the finest, most reliable, smartest, and most loyal person he had ever known. Then Trump said (cue Trump’s ego): “I would be upset with Lindsey for saying this, because I thought I had all of those qualities.”

When Trump appears on the road with Republican candidates who still want to be seen with him, he talks mostly about himself — explaining, for example, why he takes large doses of aspirin daily (he says he “psychologically” needs it); claiming that he has one of the highest IQs “anywhere in the world”; warning that if Democrats take over Congress he’ll be impeached; blaming his lousy polls on “an extremely poor job of promotion,” complaining that his hair is thinning; and railing at the media for not reporting the “huge crowds I’m attracting” to “my” rallies.

He barely mentions the Republican candidates. He doesn’t even talk about America as a whole. Instead, he praises Americans who support him and criticizes Americans who oppose him — such as those in Los Angeles and San Diego, whom he invited Iran to nuke.

He discounts polls showing a blue wave as “fake” because, he insists, the polls haven’t factored in his campaign appearances. “They don’t account for the fact that Trump is out campaigning,” he says. “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!”

He’s been deaf to bipartisan concerns over his use of millions of taxpayer dollars to run ads boosting himself — finally conceding last week that he’ll pay for them out of his MAGA, Inc. PAC but won’t commit to reimbursing the public for the cost of the ads he’s already run.

Will Republicans blame him if the GOP loses Congress? More than 30 percent of non-MAGA voters who backed Trump in 2024 say they will blame him for any loss. (Half of Democratic midterm voters say they’ll attribute the loss to Trump, and 46 percent of Democratic voters say they’re casting ballots mainly to oppose Trump.)

But I don’t think he gives a fig. Trump isn’t out campaigning for Republican candidates. He’s campaigning for his boundless ego.

His rallies are delivering to him what he craves more than anything else: audiences that worship him. Although the crowds are far smaller than before, he’s still basking in their adoration.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

A group of men accused of assaulting a woman who heckled President Donald Trump at a recent rally remain uncharged nearly two weeks later, according to a report from The New York Times, with one commentator calling it a prime example of the sort of "selective good ole boy justice" that Trump has allowed to flourish.

As the Times' report detailed on Saturday, 29-year-old Blake Miley attended the Oct. 12 Trump midterm rally in Youngstown wearing a shirt calling for the release of the Epstein files, and at one point, stood up and repeatedly called the president a "fascist." In response, Milly "was tackled, held down and punched by male rally-goers as the president mocked her from the stage, calling her 'scum,' 'low-class,' and 'a fat guy.'" Trump, who misgendered Miley multiple times, suggested from the stage that her parents were supporters of his.

"Ms. Miley attended the rally alone, and had intentionally seated herself among people who seemed older, she said. She hoped it would keep her safe," the report detailed. "But as soon as she started yelling, a man grabbed for her neck and then shoved her backward, video of the episode shows. When she stood back up, another man appeared to pull her to the ground, put her in a headlock, yank her hair and punch her in the face. She remembers being hit twice, unable to get up until Mahoning County sheriff’s deputies intervened about 30 seconds into the brawl."

The report added: "The deputies escorted Ms. Miley out of the arena. The men who attacked her were left alone. One raised his fists and high-fived those around him. In the arena’s parking lot, Ms. Miley was shaking so severely that onlookers called her an ambulance. She said she spent a few hours at the hospital, was discharged, and drove in a daze to her mobile home north of Columbus. She threw her Epstein shirt in her closet and collapsed onto her bed."

Now, as of the report's publication, no charges have been filed against the men who attacked Miley. As videos of the incident began to circulate, the local sheriff's office was "flooded with angry calls" from people demanding that something be done. In spite of criticism, Republican Sheriff Jerry Greene insists that steps are being taken in the case.

"Sheriff Greene, who had changed parties to become a Republican in 2023, said that he is, in fact, doing something," the Times detailed. "He reviewed body camera footage, which he said shows that his deputies were pushing through the crowd to reach Ms. Miley and did not witness the punch. He has identified three men who he said took part in the assault, including a New Jersey resident who said in a now-deleted Facebook post that he and two friends had 'subdued her and threw her to the concrete.' Investigators believe the other two men, including the one who threw the punch, are local... The sheriff said that all three would be interviewed in coming days. He is waiting for medical records from Ms. Miley’s trip to the emergency room, he added, to determine whether her injuries were severe enough to warrant felony charges instead of misdemeanors."

Reacting to the report on BlueSky, Soraya Nadia McDonald, a writer and cultural critic formerly of the Washington Post, argued that this sort of response to MAGA-affiliated violence was directly from the Jim Crow playbook.

"I need people to understand this selective good ole boy justice — the kind that protects abusers, rewards impunity, and openly flouts rule of law and equal protection under it — is Jim Crow s——, practically speaking," McDonald wrote. "It's how Jim Crow terrorism FLOURISHED. Trump broadened the acceptable targets."

Donald Trump has a vast emptiness inside him.

It cannot be filled with money, power, attention, or love.

Trump is the most powerful person in the world. He has billions of dollars. He has dominated an era. Yet the need, the hunger, the drive cannot be satisfied. This must be a torturous existence.

His niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and longtime critic, put it this way in a video last year:

“The one thing Donald most desperately needs and has never gotten and will never get, because of how damaged and depraved his own father made him, is love. That is why he needs more of anything else. Thinking that will fill the void. More money, more power, a bigger ballroom, more fake medals and fake prizes and fake honors.”

For the past few weeks, Trump has been barnstorming red-state America, rallying his MAGA followers for the midterm elections.

Leading political analysts and pollsters expect that the Republican Party will be soundly defeated, almost certainly losing the House and possibly the Senate as well.

The rallies serve no obvious political purpose. His unpopularity makes him toxic to the candidates he is campaigning for. Many would do much better if he stayed home. His motives are almost wholly personal: the rallies are his emotional safe space, a home where he can soak up love and attention from his MAGA followers.

But Trump’s idea of love often looks like abuse.

At a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, on October 10, Trump mocked his own followers: “I could say the stupidest things, and you’d clap.” The crowd laughed.

A few days later in Bullhead City, Arizona, he bragged about passing multiple cognitive tests ("I aced them…. Because I'm a freaking genius, that’s why.”) and implied that few of his followers could do the same.

These resemble humiliation rituals, a standard practice in cults and other coercive groups, designed to psychologically bind the followers to the leader and to one another.

Trump uses the same techniques on his Cabinet and inner circle when he gifts them painfully ill-fitting shoes that they are expected to wear and praise.

Too much of the commentary, especially from liberal, progressive, and Never-Trump voices, is fixated on the mockery as more proof that his followers are stupid and marks for the con.

But the deeper and far more dangerous story is that these rallies are love festivals for Trump, feeding him the narcissistic fuel that drives his authoritarian project.

Trump must be loved, and when he isn’t, he must be obeyed. He cannot accept rejection or criticism.

During his speech in Clarksville, Trump said “love” 37 times, by my count. That is not a coincidence. It is a way of conditioning his followers.

“There is such love in these rooms… I mean, it’s amazing. When you stand up here, it’s like, the love.”

The crowd chanted Trump’s name, and someone in the crowd shouted back, “We love you!”

A recent taxpayer-funded propaganda video reinforced the same theme: dozens of images of Trump set to an R&B song that repeats, “Love me… love me… love me…”

His fundraising emails read like a jilted lover’s texts, with subject lines such as “I cannot afford to be rejected by you today!” and “Don’t reject me!” and “This is heartbreaking…”

With the midterms imminent and polls plummeting, the emails are becoming even more desperate.

In another email on Friday, October 16, Trump begged for prayers and sympathy.

At the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas, on September 10, Trump led his followers in a loyalty oath to himself that included a pledge to “cheat like hell.”

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends, I will do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do….I am going to go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3.

Trump is extracting love and obedience in the same breath.

I asked Steven Hassan, author of The Cult of Trump, why Trump’s crowds respond the way they do:

Trump followers have been conditioned to expect Trump to be politically incorrect to get a reaction. But these people are not thinking for themselves; they are being affected by the authority figure and reinforced by all the other believers.

Pundits make the mistake of saying brainwashed people are stupid and that they would never fall for a mind controller. In more than 50 years of doing this work full time, I can honestly say it isn't true for the vast and overwhelming majority. Anyone can be deceived, especially at a vulnerable moment of their lives, or fall in love with their cult recruiter, not yet understanding it is a cult.

People are emotional, social beings. It is a myth that we are logical and independent.

Words work because they elicit responses and create associations in our minds. In many people, talking about love and using the hypnotic tone of being in love elicits a projection of the love they have for him. The followers wish that Trump loved them back.

People don’t believe in Donald Trump. They believe in the model programmed in their minds of Donald Trump.

The love survives hunger. NBC News recently interviewed Trump followers in rural West Virginia who are starving because of his administration’s cuts to food assistance and other social safety programs.

One retiree among them, who is struggling to afford groceries, and worried about heating her home with winter almost here, had a message for Trump: “I love you, but I think you can do a better job than what you’re doing.”

If Trump and the MAGA Republicans lose the midterms, he faces what clinicians call a “narcissistic collapse.” It will be very ugly. Trump will likely lash out in a fit of destruction and revenge.

In a new essay, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman looks to one of the darkest chapters of modern history for a precedent:

By the middle of March 1945 even Adolf Hitler knew that the war was lost. Soviet forces were within 45 miles of Berlin. American forces had crossed the Rhine and were well on their way to encircling the remaining German defenders. But Hitler didn’t believe that he had failed. He believed that he had been failed by the German people.

So, on March 19 he issued the “Decree concerning demolitions in the Reich territory,” which has come to be known as the Nerobefehl or Nero decree. It ordered the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure — supposedly to deny that infrastructure to the Allies, but the obvious purpose was to punish his own country.

Trump’s own Nero decree would be quieter. If he gets his way, it would be just as total.

Trump is like an energy vampire, sucking the life force out of his followers and, ultimately, the nation as a whole.

Many of his MAGA followers would gladly make the sacrifice for their Dear Leader. This is what clinicians call “identification with the aggressor” on a massive scale. In the end, Trump will leave his followers as discarded, empty husks, useless to him.

This is a very nervous time in America. I worry for the innocent, and for the rest of us who resisted this thing.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics and opinion writer whose work considers American democracy, inequality, political power, and the enduring significance of race in American society and the wider world. He was formerly a senior politics writer at Salon. His essays and commentary have been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, The Atlantic, and other leading publications. He hosts two podcasts: The Chauncey DeVega Show and The Truth Report.

President Donald Trump's "staggeringly corrupt" new push to release "slopaganda" ads is not a sign of his power, according to a new analysis from The New Republic; it is actually him realizing that if his "goose isn’t cooked yet, the pot is at least boiling."

Trump raised alarms over the past few weeks with a new wave of ads touting little more than himself and his own image, all funded by the government using tax dollars. The ads were widely condemned as illegal, given the use of government funds to create political messaging, and poorly conceived in the run-up to the midterms, given that voters are keen to punish Republicans for Trump's failures.

Digging into the situation in a new piece published Saturday, New Republic deputy editor Jason Linkins argued that these ads should not be seen as "some kind of flex, or one more scandalous abuse of the public trust" from Trump. Rather, he suggested that they exposed Trump's "desperation" in the face of impending failure.

"I also think, if anything, this fusillade of propaganda will likely backfire," Linkins wrote. "These ads haven’t generated good news for Trump; very few people outside of the administration and its obvious sycophants have tried to defend them. Moreover, the media seems resistant to give this story the 'both sides' treatment. As with Trump’s 25-minute prime-time ramble last July, the political press seems wise to what’s going on. Of that aforementioned speech, TNR editor Michael Tomasky said, the overall reaction to the president’s attempt to shine us on 'tells us that that power he had over people and institutions a year or 15 months ago has evanesced.' I think these PSAs do little else than advertise that fact."

These ads, Linkins continued, are also just another part of the gradually building storm that looks set to wipe out the GOP in the midterms. Among the other issues, he explained, is Trump's plan to hold midterm rallies in states typically considered "bastions of conservatism," exposing the "tremendous peril" that the party faces as voter revolt becomes evident all over the country. These issues, along with the president's tumbling approval ratings and leaks exposing how frustrated Republicans have become with him, are "all adding up to defeat."

"The Cook Political Report says a Democratic takeover of the House is a 'done deal' and that winning the Senate is 'very realistic,'" Linkins concluded. "The Quinnipiac generic poll of the House has Democrats opening up a 51 percent to 39 percent lead, which are bloodbath numbers. The only headwind Democrats face is that while voters seem willing to give them their vote this year, they’re not as ready to give them their affection. Still, you’d rather be the Democrats right now than the GOP, who like Vice President JD Vance, have been left begging voters for a 'second chance' without understanding that they’ve already received that second chance— and they’ve blown it."