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Even after rattling off various positive measures of Donald Trump's health in various press conferences, White House physician Dr. Sean Conley has been adamant about not answering one of the most vital questions facing those exposed to Trump in recent days: When was the last time testing showed Trump was not carrying the pandemic virus that would send him to the hospital only a day after the White House admitted he was sick?

That's important, because it would allow those who came into contact with Trump during last Tuesday's presidential debate to know whether they spent 90 minutes in an enclosed space with a COVID-19 carrier shouting at them for most of that time—one of the precise scenarios that experts warn is most likely to result in pandemic spread.

It's also important because all evidence so far points to the White House knowing of Trump's illness at least as of Monday, before the debate. And it's important because the pattern of infections coming out of the White House do not appear to correlate with people who attended the Rose Garden celebration the previous weekend. They appear to more closely correlate with people known to have spent significant amounts of time in proximity to Donald Trump himself.

On Monday, we were treated to a rare sight at the White House: An outdoor press briefing in which Trump spoke at a podium alone, while all other speakers at the pandemic-related briefing used a podium set up on a separate platform well-distanced from Trump's own.

Tuesday's debate featured another unusual sight: Melania Trump alone, among the Trump family, followed debate venue rules and kept her mask on during the full event—only removing it when approaching Donald at his podium for the usual post-debate family visuals. But the Trump family arrived at the debate venue too late to be given COVID-19 tests at the venue, debate moderator Chris Wallace said afterward. "There was an honor system when it came to people that came into the hall from the two campaigns."

There are reasons to believe the White House is lying about the outbreak timeline, and it is absolutely certain that they are hiding key elements of that timeline, as White House doctor Conley did yet again on Monday. The first known illnesses from the White House outbreak are, for the most part, those immediately surrounding Trump himself.

• White House adviser Hope Hicks and assistant Nicholas Luna

• First lady Melania Trump

• Trump's debate prep team member Chris Christie and Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien

• White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and two assistant press secretaries

But what of the multiple Rose Garden guests who tested positive after the Saturday celebration held for Amy Coney Barrett, including Sen. Thom Tillis, Sen. Mike Lee, pastor Greg Laurie, Notre Dame president John Jenkins, and Kellyanne Conway?

All of them were seen in close proximity to Trump in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, during an indoors reception for Barrett that featured a much smaller group of people. Infections during the Rose Garden event were not, as far as we know, spread evenly throughout the outside crowd. They have appeared predominantly among the most important guests, the ones allowed to sit and the first few rows—and who were invited inside for a more personal meet-and-greet hosted by Trump.

The evidence, then, is that Trump himself may have been the source of infection for most of the COVID-19 cases in his orbit. Whether he was or wasn't, the outbreak was in full swing as of Saturday, during the Diplomatic Room event.

The White House, however, is flatly refusing to tell the public, the Biden campaign, the debate staff and others Trump met with when Trump, who is allegedly as president tested daily or near-daily, was last known to be free of the virus. They either don't know—because they haven't been doing the testing—or they're hiding it because they have a reason to hide it. The White House has also announced that it will not be doing contact tracing of Rose Garden guests, nor will they allow the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention to launch that effort itself.

They are quite insistent on not finding out either the true extent of the White House outbreak, or revealing its origins.

It's reasonable to question whether the White House knew Trump was infected, or suspected it, at least as of Monday, when Trump's press event was set up to have the unusual dual-podium arrangement. It's reasonable to question whether the Trump campaign avoided testing at the venue not out of lateness, but because they did not want testing to be done. It's not just reasonable to assume Trump, a malevolent narcissist, would willingly expose others to his illness for momentary gain: It's proven, both from Trump's pointless but self-celebrating joyride around Walter Reed, unnecessarily putting Secret Service agents in an airtight container with him at the likely height of his own contagiousness, and his immediate removal of his mask upon returning to the White House.

There are very good reasons to suspect that the White House knew or believed Trump to be infected with COVID-19 before the debate with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden took place, and that the White House covered up his infection to allow the debate to go forward. It is possible that, had Trump not become so physically ill two days afterward as to require public acknowledgement, then hospitalization, the White House intended to hide Trump's infection from the public completely.

This would be unconscionable behavior by itself, but exposing a rival presidential candidate to a deadly disease on purpose brings it past unconscionable and into the realm of the unthinkable. But here we are.

This is not an idle, fringe supposition. Senate Democratic leaders are themselves demanding that the White House explain their secrecy around Trump's initial diagnosis, accusing the White House (correctly) of "deliberately" hiding this information. The press is focusing in on this question as well. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that this White House would cover up a presidential illness even if it caused the possible death of others, and even if it exposed Trump's immediate campaign rival to the same disease. On the contrary, it is the most plausible theory we have as to why the White House is refusing to clarify the timeline of Trump's illness.

White House physician Dr. Sean Conley is explicitly hiding this information—and endangering lives. This is not tenable. If the press cannot scrape an answer from him, Vice President Biden's Secret Service detail might need to go question him directly.

The true nature of President Donald Trump's unusually close relationship with his young personal aide, Natalie Harp, has been the subject of much rampant speculation, and now, a doctor has shared a new theory about her role in Trump's life, related to his declining health.

Adam James is a licensed physical therapist with years of experience working in the home healthcare sector, giving him extensive up-close knowledge of patients dealing with physical and cognitive decline. He is also a prolific online content creator, better known by the handle "Epistemic Crisis," who has used his professional insights to try to explain the issues that Trump is dealing with and suggest where his condition might be heading next.

On Sunday, he was interviewed in a new video from former Democratic strategist turned progressive political commentator, Keith Edwards. He argued that Harp's role in Trump's inner circle, despite the media frenzy, remains underreported, and pressed James on what he believes might be going on.

Pulling from his own experience, James suggested that Harp is providing a very specific service to Trump: "a dementia home healthcare aide."

"So she is the insulation between him and what is actually happening in the world and his administration," he explained. "She filters every piece of information that gets to him or does not get to him. And they're doing this to prevent his demented paranoia and agitation from derailing the entire day."

He added: "She, for whatever damn reason, let the president see negative reporting on him from MS NOW and the next thing you know, he bans MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the damn White House. I don't know what she was thinking doing that because her job is to keep him calm, keep him from agitation, make it totally fine that the White House staff can't get him to focus on doing his f—— job. He doesn't care about this job; he only cares about the damn ballroom, the helipad, the triumphal arch, or whatever the hell they're calling it now."

James further argued that Harp "administers to [Trump's] hygiene needs," a claim based on his belief in the allegations about him being "horribly incontinent." He gave particular weight to the accusations of Noel Casler, who worked as a talent wrangler behind the scenes of The Apprentice and has made several claims about Trump's behavior and health, including that he is chronically incontinent and needs adult diapers.

"Noel has never been sued because they don't want that smoke in discovery, because Noel's telling the truth," James added. "And so you have to have a particular kind of person, psychologically speaking, to volunteer for this job, to accept this job, because not only are you basically caring for a child, you're wiping their a——...That's what's in that big ass bag she's carrying around. There's hygiene supplies, Depends briefs [and] what we call 'chucks,' which are the disposable, you know, hygienic barriers that you can lay on a bed or a sofa or a chair or something to, you know, attend to somebody's toileting hygiene and keep everything from being ruined on Marine One or Air Force One."

President Donald Trump's Transportation Department, which is led by his fellow former reality TV star Sean Duffy, is making it easier for airlines to rip off their customers.

"Last month, the Transportation Department announced that 10 types of flight disruptions would no longer be attributed to the air carrier," wrote The Hill reporter Addy Bink on Sunday. "Instead, the 10 disruptions, listed below, will be tracked in the new 'Section 511(b) category'”

The new disruptions include cybersecurity attacks, a baggage or cargo delay not caused by the airline's own bag system, aircraft cleaning needed after the death of a passenger, aircraft damage caused by extreme weather or foreign object debris or sabotage, overheated breaks that cause emergency procedures, medical emergencies not caused by the airline, the removal of unruly passengers, government shutdowns, airport closure due to natural events like ash or wind or wind shear and unscheduled maintenance.

The result could very easily be “quite a big blow potentially for customers,” Clint Henderson, the managing editor for The Points Guy, told Nexstar. He added, “The one that is especially outrageous to me as a consumer advocate is that if a plane goes mechanical or has maintenance issues, that is no longer considered a reason the airline would give you compensation," not even food or airline vouchers, if one of the incidents arises.

“the airline wouldn’t necessarily give you food or hotel vouchers.” He predicted there will be more flight disruptions and that passengers will need to “have a backup plan in case things go sideways.”

This is not the first time Trump has pursued policies which seem to harm the working class voters who supported him. Trump's Agriculture Department, following his 2025 executive order against subsidizing wind and solar energy, first restricted and has now effectively ended solar funding through the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), which has existed for decades so that farmers and rural businesses can sell excess power back to the grid to cut energy costs and earn extra income.

“It’s like stacking the deck against family farms, and entrepreneurial businesses in small towns that are trying to bootstrap themselves,” Matt Russell, the executive director of the Iowa Farmers Union, told Grist. “It’s picking winners and losers, and the losers are the very kinds of farms and businesses and communities that I think the vast majority of American taxpayers think that they’re investing in.”

Trump has also weakened labor unions and presided over 400,000 in job cuts, including 75,000 manufacturing jobs as well as many other jobs from working class and union-protected positions. As a labor studies scholar recently wrote for The Conversation, "For America’s unionized workforce, the overall state of the economy is bleak. Threats from AI and robotics abound. Pledges by U.S. and international corporations to invest in new plants remain largely pledges. The roughly 400,000 federal job cuts during President Donald Trump’s second term have disrupted lives. Many of these jobs were previously represented by labor unions."

The president has not spared supporters in states that overwhelmingly voted for him. An August report revealed that Trump's cuts to the federal workforce, which included 377,000 people, and noted that the hardest-hit groups were often those most likely to back Trump. Within 10 states “most of which voted for Trump in 2024 and half with sizable rural populations, the federal workforce was slashed by 25 percent or more,” reported NBC News' Ashley Mowreader on Tuesday.

Mowreader continued, “Across all departments, close to half of federal job cuts from June 2025 to January 2026 impacted more staff in states with a larger-than-average share of rural residents.”

For all the money they have been able to raise and spend over their Democratic opponents, Republicans appear to have been lighting their money on fire for all the good it has done them, with two political experts highlighting the clear evidence in recent data that proves this point.

On Sunday, Pod Save America co-host and polling analyst Dan Pfeiffer interviewed Amy Walter, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, one of the foremost election tracking and predicting firms in the U.S. Walter wrote earlier this month that the political environment for the GOP is as bad as it has been in the last 20 years, suggesting to Pfeiffer that they might both be getting flashbacks to 2006.

"We're all coming back. This feels very 2006 deja vu," Walter said. "Because you have a president with an approval rating under 40 percent, which is where George W. Bush was at this point in 2006, an unpopular war and corruption being sort of the center of the conversation in Washington. Back then it was Jack Abramoff; now, it is all of the things."

Walter also noted that, for all the hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans have raised and spent heading towards the midterms, they remain underwater in terms of approval from voters, and in some cases are worse off, all while Democrats have managed to keep their numbers above water. All of this, she suggested, is a sign that Republicans are not getting any meaningful electoral returns from burning through all of that money.

"How much money has been spent in the last three weeks in these races, right? More than millions of dollars," she said. "And if you're in Alaska or Texas or Ohio or Iowa, your goal isn't to try to win persuadable independents. You're sending signals to your base about why it's important for [them] to turn out. And thus far, I mean, to me, what's the most telling in some of the polling we've seen recently is that opinions of the Democrats remain above water, and opinions of the Republican candidates are below water, which says, boy, you've spent a lot of money, and I don't know that you're getting what you thought you were going to get from all of it."

Elsewhere in the conversation, Walter also noted that the flagging enthusiasm among Republican voters compared to others is another sign that the blue wave wipeout could be even worse than in years like 2006 and 2018, where polls suggested that the GOP base was solidly engaged enough to fend off the worst-case scenario. In 2026, with Trump's leadership having broken the spirit of many Republican voters, it is not clear that many will even bother to turn out to the polls next month.

Former supporters of President Donald Trump "can all remember where we were when we finally admitted" that he is terrible, one ashamed former MAGA follower wrote for The Spectator, who further revealed the exact moment she knew she was done with him.

Writing for the outlet on Sunday, Julie Burchill, the controversial author and columnist who until recently voiced support for conservative politics in the U.K., explained how Trump's recent social media post involving manipulated footage of a tragic tiger attack at a British zoo hit her as an "awful shock."

"After sharing online footage of this almost surreally sad event on his ‘Truth Social’ platform (with the text ‘Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT’), Trump proceeded to go full tonto by following it up with a series of after-midnight posts," she explained. "This included an AI-generated video of himself wrestling with a tiger and coming out on top, ultimately embracing it to the strains of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. Another video finds the big orange baboon comparing himself to a lion – yes, ‘the king of the jungle’ – while characterising Democrat luminaries such as Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi as ‘jackals, hyenas…barking at him, laughing at him…every once in a while the lion has to show the jackals who he is.'"

She added: "As if this unhinged take on The Jungle Book wasn’t jaw-dropping enough, there were a slew of other midnight-oil online musings. This included one wherein a voice-over makes the somewhat immoderate claim that Trump has been appointed by the Almighty as ‘caretaker’ of the world, with another dig at his nay-sayers as ‘wolves’ and ‘vipers’ – just in case we hadn’t got the anthropomorphic memo."

Burchill admitted that the posts were shocking "those of us who have talked him up over the years and – somewhat shamefully – greeted each new breach of decency with an indulgent what-a-wag/take-that-snowflakes chuckle," but stressed that it ultimately was not surprising. She noted that Trump has, over the last decade, embraced social media with "immoderate glee," calling the technology his "drug of choice," considering his lifelong abstention from things like alcohol and smoking.

"If Trump did do drugs and/or drink, he might use them as an excuse. That would be bad enough," Burchill wrote. "But to do these things in one’s right mind suggests that there is something very wrong with that mind; the phrase ‘second childhood’ occurs, when an aged person behaves in a way we might more readily associate with a badly-socialised brat. At the age of 80, Trump does seem like a particularly silly child, perhaps one who has consumed an excessive amount of E-numbers at his own birthday party and is one gummy sweet away from jumping on the table and announcing that he’s the king of the castle and those funny foreign kids are dirty rascals."

She added later: "[Trump derangement syndrome] is no excuse for my foolhardy fawning over this man. I should have drawn the line at the persistent sex-pest allegations, the ludicrous call for a ‘united Ireland’ and, more than anything, his repeated disrespect towards President Zelensky. This has now come to a head after Trump attempted to humiliate this dignified and stoic man by mocking his clothes. The US President’s cuddling up to Vladimir Putin seems to know no limits now. I’m ashamed that it took me so long to see sense; I swallowed that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ cliche to a point where I couldn’t seem to see past it. Like a long relationship you’ve invested a lot in, I’d defended him to my incredulous friends for so long that to back down would make me look like an atrocious judge of character – which I am, and always have been, and so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise."

President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, ex-UN Ambassador John Bolton, blasted his former boss on Sunday for failing to "understand" basic global politics, particularly when it comes to Ukraine.

Referring to the infamous Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin, Bolton told Times Radio that "he has called people like this useful idiots. Trump really doesn’t understand what’s at stake in Ukraine. And in the past several weeks, he has been focused not on geopolitics, but on domestic American politics. He’s in deep trouble."

Bolton then pivoted to discussing domestic politics.

"The Republicans are facing a referendum on the Trump administration," Bolton told Boulton. "People are unhappy. There are gonna be substantial Republican losses. Inflation is one of the factors working against Republican candidates. Diesel fuel, gasoline are factors in that. And what Trump is trying to do is take steps to say domestically, “I’m gonna be able to bring down oil prices.” Now, none of what he’s doing with Russia will do that, but for Trump, it’s announcing the deal. It’s not necessarily the results of it."

He added, "But the international effect of what he’s doing is to give Russia an enormous favor to call in at some point, because Putin, by agreeing to this deal and other things, has given Trump a favor when Trump needs it at home. So it’s a very disturbing development all the way around."

The former Trump adviser also noted that Trump is easily manipulated, citing the president's obsequiousness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin as an example.

"If he and Vladimir Putin are good friends, he thinks US-Russia state-to-state relations are good," Bolton told Boulton. "That’s not correct for many reasons. Most importantly, because Vladimir Putin doesn’t see Trump as a friend. He sees him as an easy mark. And every time Trump, in a very needy way, comes to Putin to ask for this diesel deal or something like that, Putin’s more than happy to give it to him and put it in his pocket to call him later."

Bolton is not alone in observing that Trump is easily swayed by flattery. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright observed about Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un that “I do think that what is worrisome to me is, in an effort to be flattered by Kim Jong-un, that he gives away something that might have a longer term effect for the next administration.”

Bolton has been a frequent critic of Trump, and the president has responded by targeting Bolton through his Justice Department. After being investigated on an 18-count indictment by the Trump administration, Bolton pleaded guilty to one count of inappropriately sharing classified information.

A growing number of Republicans are declining to take part in debates against their midterm opponents, and as one campaign communications veteran wrote for MS NOW, there is a "cowardly" truth that they are actually hiding from.

Symone Sanders-Townsend is an MS NOW host and contributor who also previously worked as a political strategist and national press secretary for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, as well as a White House spokesperson and senior advisor for former Vice President Kamala Harris. In a new piece published Sunday morning, she detailed the growing trend of Republicans ducking out of planned debates against their Democratic opponents.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, she noted, has taken part in election debates throughout his time in politics. Now, however, as polls show his current opponent, Gina Hinojosa, gaining on him, he suddenly "decided a debate is unnecessary," prompting Hinojosa to hold an event outside the governor's mansion. Elsewhere in Texas, GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton has declined to debate his increasingly popular opponent, James Talarico.

"In Florida, Republican Sen. Ashley Moody has declined to debate Angie Nixon," Sanders-Townsend wrote. "In Mississippi, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said there’s 'no point' in debating Democratic nominee Scott Colom. Why are so many Republicans making the same decision in the same election cycle?... I have some thoughts."

Sanders-Townsend highlighted her own past experience working as "deputy communications director for the Democratic nominee for governor in Nebraska" in the 2014 midterms, which she said were anything but a "pleasant" time to be a Democratic candidate. Republicans had successfully turned President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act into a heated political issue, making it "difficult to keep the conversation focused on the issues we wanted to discuss" when the conversation would invariably get wrenched towards taking Democrats to task for the ACA.

Now, the tables are turned, she argued, and Republicans are running scared at the prospect of having to answer for their capitulation to President Donald Trump and his toxic agenda.

"That is the political environment I recognize today, except Republicans are now being asked to defend the president’s agenda," Sanders-Townsend wrote. "Donald Trump unilaterally imposed tariffs, raising costs for American businesses and consumers. Then came his war of choice in Iran. Gas and diesel prices climbed, raising costs for households and businesses. And Americans are still waiting for a clear explanation of how this war will end. Where were Republicans in Congress?"

She added later: "A debate means explaining those choices — or why you didn’t challenge them — while someone a few feet away questions your answer. I can understand why a campaign might not want that. But refusing to face those questions is cowardly... A politician who treats difficult questions as optional is telling us how they understand the power they hold. Perhaps the most revealing thing about these Republicans isn’t what they might say on a debate stage. It’s what they believe they no longer have to explain."

President Donald Trump's construction plans seem to take chunks out of East Potomac Park — and online commentators are furious.

"Trump’s plan shrinks the course from 36 holes to 18 but impacts more than golfers," wrote The Washington Post's sports writer Rick Maese on X. "It eliminates Ohio Drive, historic mini golf and a grove of Japanese cherry trees — reshaping space used by thousands of cyclists, runners, anglers, bird-watchers and picnickers."

An attorney agreed with him and shared his outrage.

"This is a travesty and unlawful," wrote lawyer and former Commerce Department employee Brian McGrail. "Every Democratic presidential candidate should commit to reestablishing the public perimeter road if Trump somehow succeeds. That won't bring back the cherry blossoms, though."

American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick argued that Trump's design for his East Potomac Golf Course will inevitably impact the public park.

"This design appears to completely eliminate the much-beloved loop road and public park at Hains Point, and cut down the cherry trees which line the road," Reichlin-Melnick said. "The park is a public space used by tens of thousands of Washingtonians and heavily visited by tourists."

Even politicians began chiming in.

"The Trump Administration was clearly lying about the reasons for their mass felling of trees in East Potomac last weekend," Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) wrote on X on Sunday.

He added, "They were lying to conceal from the American people that, at a time when our country is at war, and everyone is worried about the economy and high prices, the President simply doesn’t care—he’s focused on building an upscale golf course within walking distance of the White House. And on his fancy ballroom and his memorial arch to himself."

Beyer continued, "The design he’s pursuing would block off roads and paths used by large numbers of local residents for cycling and walking, no doubt to make the area another exclusive hangout for Trump’s rich and powerful friends. And once again he’s doing all of that at great expense, on your dime."

Trump's golf course renovations have long been a source of controversy. Last week, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes rejected Trump's arguments for having cut down hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links.

"The Court concludes, on this limited record, that government officials raced to undertake the [tree-management plan] because President Trump demands haste on his redesign, and not because of some newfound zeal to implement a small part of a seven-year-old," Reyes wrote.

The president even has a controversial relationship with the game of golf itself. Sportswriter Rick Reilly has accused Trump of being an inveterate cheat.

Reilly has written that, “Among the many hilarious things about club championship #43 is that he lies so much about them he loses his place. We went from 26 to 36 overnight, then skipped 39, 40 and 41. Actual number: 0.”

President Donald Trump and his administration are abusing and spinning the traditional language of political decency to launder their radical new goals, with two legal scholars explaining for The Hill how this warping of reality is almost literally "Through the Looking Glass."

Writing for the outlet on Sunday, legal scholar David Wippman and historian Glenn C. Altschuler detailed the administration's last-minute spending of federal human rights funds on far-right pet causes "far removed" from anything that has ever been the purview of U.S. foreign policy.

"On Sept. 30, with just hours left to allocate the money in its human rights fund, the State Department directed most of it — more than $175 million — to conservative causes, many of them far removed from the traditional priorities of U.S. foreign policy," Wippman and Altschuler explained. "The recipients are not dissidents, journalists or persecuted minorities. Instead, the Trump administration has chosen to support allegedly persecuted whites in South Africa; combat supposed 'democratic backsliding' by European allies; and challenge judicial institutions in Brazil accused of censoring conservatives. One program seeks to promote Western 'civilizational values' by assisting opponents of the European Union’s 'supranational and bureaucratic overreach' and restrictions on extremist political speech."

The pair explained further that even as Trump has removed the U.S. from many mainstream global human rights initiatives, his administration has continued to co-opt the language of human rights conversations to express its new aims, creating a dangerous spin meant to warp reality and meaning to its whims.

"Nowhere is this more visible than in the State Department’s revamped annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," they explained. "Instead of focusing on torture, extrajudicial killing and political repression in authoritarian states, the reports now emphasize restrictions against 'hate speech' and extremist political parties in democratic countries, including France, Canada and Germany. Attention has been drastically curtailed to violence against women, racial and ethnic violence, gay and transgender rights, government corruption and environmental justice."

They added: "Meanwhile, the administration has largely ignored human rights violations by many pro-Trump authoritarian governments. The report on El Salvador, for example, makes the demonstrably false claim that there are 'no credible reports' there 'of significant human rights abuses.'"

On the domestic front, the approach is much the same, with the administration's much-discussed crusade against "DEI" attempting to invert the perception of programs meant to aid historically marginalized, instead painting them as marginalizing white people and men.

"The day after returning to office in 2025, President Trump issued an executive order denouncing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in government, academia and the private sector — not simply as illegal but 'dangerous, demeaning, and immoral,'" the pair explained further. "His administration dismantled such federal programs and barred them among federal contractors. He challenged race-conscious policies in higher education and private employment and launched investigations of institutions that continue to pursue diversity initiatives. After rescinding affirmative-action guidance dating to 1979 that had encouraged employers to improve opportunities for women and minorities, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission invited white men to file workplace discrimination complaints."

This entire push to force the language of legitimacy to fit their own aims has a distinct literary corollary, Wippman and Alstschuler concluded.

"In 'Through the Looking Glass' [by Lewis Carroll], Humpty Dumpty insisted to Alice that 'when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,'" the pair wrote. "The Trump administration seems determined to claim the same prerogative for its mean-spirited and damaging approach to human rights. That said, here’s hoping all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put human rights together again."

President Donald Trump's foreign policies are literally creating anarchy with his policies toward NATO and the rest of Europe, at least according to a piece in a British political newspaper published on Sunday.

" Trump is sowing the seeds for anarchy by moving America directly into Russia’s orbit, a ploy that would undermine NATO and potentially even collapse the transatlantic alliance," wrote Simon Marks, an Emmy Award-winning US commentator based in Washington DC, for The i Paper. "Two months before Trump is due to host the G20 summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida, he wants to solidify relations with Putin and restore him to the world’s top table."

Marks continued, "The Kremlin is still mulling Trump’s invitation to Putin. Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his G20 colleagues could be forced to decide how to respond if the Russian leader – wanted for Ukraine-related war crimes by the International Criminal Court – is walking alongside them among the palm trees in the Sunshine State."

After reviewing Trump's efforts to alleviate the economic isolation imposed on Russia since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Marks described how Russia supports Trump's policies and viewed the exempting of Russia from special sanctions as a "truly historic moment."

"Trump may well view things through the same prism," Marks argued. "His irritation with Zelensky has long been evident, and over the past week he has repeatedly characterised Ukraine as the troublemaker for refusing to solve the conflict, rather than Russia, which continues to terrorise Ukrainian civilians and demand 30 per cent of its neighbour’s territory."

Marks also pointed out that Trump's foreign policy blunders have taken a domestic political toll.

"Having relentlessly insisted that the issue of 'affordability' is a made-up concept concocted by the Democrats, blamed Ukraine for America’s economic woes rather than his fruitless war on Iran and done nothing to provide Republicans with tangible policy support in the final weeks of the midterm campaign, Trump would have been hard pressed to do more to undermine his party’s fortunes," Marks observed.

Trump's fellow conservatives often agree with commentators like Marks.

"To be clear," the conservative National Review wrote in September, "Trump was right about one big thing: that Greenland merited much more attention than it had been getting. The Arctic may not have warmed up by as much and as quickly as Al Gore and others claimed it would, but it has done so by enough to render it much more accessible than before. As a result, it is becoming a zone of geopolitical competition for its resources and, more simply, because of location, location, location. For obvious geographical reasons, that increases the already-considerable importance of Greenland to this country."

“The world’s liberal democracies had grown comfortable and complacent, like the eponymous character at the beginning of Rocky III, while the tyrannical, authoritarian, and malign regimes (the Clubber Langs of the world, if you will) grew stronger and more prepared,” wrote Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project, for the conservative publication The Dispatch in July. He was particularly alarmed that “President Trump has continued to suggest that the United States—the most powerful of NATO’s member nations—might not support its fellow members if they were attacked. Trump has even suggested that the United States might be the country doing the attacking. The Danes took his threats against Greenland so seriously that they deployed their special operations forces to the territory in preparation for an American offensive.”

President Donald Trump's chaotic control over the country is poised to hit a serious roadblock if and when Republicans lose power in the midterms, and according to a new piece from The Hill, there is one particular tool that will prove to be Democrats' secret weapon in Congress for reining him in.

Driven largely by voter disdain for Trump's leadership, Republicans are widely expected to lose much of their power in Washington, D.C., in next month's midterms. The Senate, once viewed as a safe for the GOP to retain, is becoming ever more likely to flip to Democratic control, while the House is such a foregone conclusion that some Republican lawmakers are openly admitting that retaining their majority in the chamber is impossible.

It is in the House, according to The Hill's Sudiksha Kochi, that Democrats are poised to gain control of their "greatest tool" to curb Trump's rampant presidency: the House Appropriations Committee.

"A Democratic takeover would put Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in line to chair the powerful House Appropriations Committee, giving Democrats greater sway over the annual spending bills that fund federal agencies and programs," Kochi explained. "They could use the process to try to rein in President Trump’s spending priorities, attach restrictions to agency funding and scrutinize how the administration is using taxpayer dollars."

She added further: "The strategy could put Democrats on a collision course with the White House and congressional Republicans, particularly if they win a razor-thin House majority. Any spending legislation would still need enough Senate support to overcome the filibuster and eventually Trump’s signature, limiting how far Democrats could go without Republican buy-in. Still, the appropriations process would give Democrats an opening to force the administration to the negotiating table."

Kochi outlined several areas in which Appropriations Committee control would allow Democrats to subject Trump's agenda to greater scrutiny and hold his administration to account. First and foremost, she highlighted Trump's pilfering of National Parks funding to pay for his D.C. monument vanity projects, with Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat and ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, telling The Hill that there are plans to begin scrutinizing this practice.

"Another area Democrats will be focused on is defense funding, especially as the war with Iran has cost the U.S. billions of dollars," Kochi added. "Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, argued that Congress needs to 'get back to parity between nondefense and defense spending.'"

She added later: "For Trump, this is all a headache, particularly as he has repeatedly tested the limits of executive authority and sought to exert greater control over federal spending, challenging Congress’s constitutional power of the purse."

We speak with the Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney about his new documentary Musk, an expansive, nearly four-hour examination of the world’s first trillionaire and how he has amassed unprecedented power in business, technology and politics. The film traces Elon Musk’s early ventures and the rise of SpaceX and Tesla, examining the role of government support in their growth. It also explores his acquisition of Twitter, now X; his alliance with President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement; and his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, whose cuts devastated federal programs, including USAID.

Gibney says Musk has carefully crafted an image of a “polymath” who can solve the world’s most pressing problems, but that he is really “kind of a ruthless businessman” willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, including “a series of elaborate cons” to win government support for his companies.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we bring you Part 2 of our conversation with Alex Gibney, Academy Award-winning director. His new film is Musk.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new Pentagon project on the future of warfare. Elon Musk will lead the task force along with former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Trump donor and weapons entrepreneur Palmer Luckey. This comes as The New York Times reports Musk has spent $366 million to help Republicans in the midterms. Now, according to NPR, SpaceX, Musk’s company, has secured over $8 billion in U.S. military contracts in this year alone. So, if he can keep the Republicans in power, $366 million is a small price to pay for that.

Can you comment on the power of Elon Musk?

ALEX GIBNEY: I mean, in a way, in the film, Musk texts to his then-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair he’s found an anomaly in the matrix. That refers to something else. But the anomaly in the matrix that Musk has found in the American political system is money. This is our great weakness. And now with an utterly transactional president and an administration that’s completely transactional, you get what you pay for. You put hundreds of millions of dollars into getting either Trump or Republicans elected, and you get paid back with enormous government contracts.

And SpaceX now, we must remember, is not only the ability to launch rockets; it’s also xAI, which is maybe the most flawed and most reckless frontier AI company that there is. But because Musk is a political contributor, he’s given a vast kind of subsidy for that flawed AI system. And indeed, you know, that system, we don’t know exactly how it’s being deployed, but it could be, as far as we know, being deployed for autonomous weapons, which is a really scary thought, since, you know, as we profile in the film, this is the — this is the AI that birthed a character online called “MechaHitler” and also, you know, introduced a product that was designed to undress young children for the amusement of pedophiles. So, this really — it’s a terrifying prospect, the idea that Elon Musk is being put in charge of the future of war. It’s a little bit like putting the Joker in charge of the Manhattan Project.

AMY GOODMAN: Actually, tell us about that incident where Grok adopted this Hitler persona. In fact, the Pentagon is using Grok.

ALEX GIBNEY: Indeed. So, I mean, you know, one of the things we all need to understand, or perhaps all of us know at this point, is that LLMs, like Grok or Claude or ChatGPT, you know, they sample a huge amount of data, and based on those samples, then they are able to feed back or to predict, you know, what you may or may not want to hear. But how they react and how they respond depends tremendously on the data that they sample. And so, you know, Musk was upset that his Grok was too woke, so suddenly he was feeding it more non-woke data, presumably stuff about Nazis, because if you feed it Nazi data, that’s what you get back in terms of a kind of a chatbot. And one day, you know, Grok, they sort of overtweaked the algorithm, and Grok was suddenly responding to everybody in a voice that was called MechaHitler.

AMY GOODMAN: So, AI, Elon Musk’s attitude toward artificial intelligence, if you can document it through time, and then what exactly xAI is doing and why it is so flawed?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, it’s fair to say that Elon Musk was one of the first people to sort of warn the public at large about the existential threat of AI. He said it was “summoning the demon.” Now, even as he was warning that and starting a nonprofit called OpenAI, which was originally started as a nonprofit to explore AI in an ethical way, he was already pivoting at Tesla in terms of using AI in the Autopilot system of his cars, which, you know, we talked about earlier. It was flawed there, and over time, it’s become flawed even as he’s expanded his AI ambitions. And there was some thought that — early on, that Musk may have been warning about the dangers of AI because his AI companies were behind. In other words, then this would give him an opportunity to catch up.

Be that as it may, flash-forward a number of years, and suddenly, you know, Musk has a company called xAI, which he folds into SpaceX just before the IPO. And I think what’s interesting about xAI is, we know that by the number of people who rather publicly left the company, very high-ranking executives who were deeply concerned about the lack of safety at xAI, that it’s a very reckless product, far more reckless even than something like OpenAI. So, you know, it’s of enormous concern that that reckless AI program would be so fully integrated into our Department of Defense.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read to you from Time magazine, Alex. They said, “In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. … Trump … asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured” — you know, then-Venzuelan President Nicolás — “Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.”

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, yeah, I think that illustrates the flaw or the confusion that we’re all suffering now between what AI is telling us and also what human beings do with AI, either the people who are in charge of it or the people who fall under its sway. So, I think the flaw in the system there is President Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to go back, and in Part 1, you talked about reasons that Elon Musk might be investigated — in fact, investigations that were dropped into a number of his companies, in fact, criminal investigations of Elon Musk, and what’s at stake right now when we see this massive amount of money he’s poured into the midterms, like more than $360 million. Talk about what happened over the years and what he’s so afraid of.

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, we just know that there were ongoing — I’m not going to remember the exact number now, but it was double figures in terms of federal investigations into his companies. And these related to NLRB investigations. I believe there are EPA investigations relating to explosions of SpaceX rockets, a tremendous number of civil investigations into malfeasance by his companies. But there was at the heart — there was, in addition, a criminal investigation into fraud relating to Autopilot in likely — we don’t know precisely the parameters of the investigation. We know it was criminal. It was actually disclosed by Tesla, and Reuters wrote a number of pieces about it. So, he jokes with Tucker Carlson, in fact, just before the election, “Oh my god, if I don’t win, I wonder how long my prison sentence is going to be, haha haha,” which is a classic Elon trope, where everything is both deadly serious and a joke at the same time. But I think it’s fair to say that his companies were at risk, and he himself was at risk of going to prison, potentially. So, that investment in Trump’s election in 2024 was hugely motivated by self-preservation.

Now, flash-forward, and you see this pattern repeating itself with this now even larger amount of money flowing to the Republican Party prior to the midterm elections. And by the way, the stated number could be much smaller than the larger number, because it doesn’t even account for dark money groups that he may have, you know, thrown money to. But I think it’s — I think it’s fair to say that he anticipates that if the Democrats win the House and the Senate, that there are going to be a lot of investigations into Musk’s activity, including his activity at DOGE, not only in terms of the lives that were lost because of the sudden shutdown of something like USAID, but also, you know, what about that data? Did he access that data? Did he take it to SpaceX? What has he done with it, if he did? So, you know, he knows those investigations are coming, so he’s kind of desperate to make sure that Republicans win this time so he’s not held to account.

AMY GOODMAN: And desperate to colonize Mars, maybe another place to go in case he’s in trouble.

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, good luck with that. I mean, I think, you know, intellectually, he may feel that he can colonize Mars. That’s not happening. Anybody who realistically looks at the likelihood that he’s going to be able to, you know, have a million people on Mars, as he’s said is likely in the next few years, is high on their own supply.

AMY GOODMAN: What about your avatar, this very creative device you use? Because Elon Musk refused to talk to you, right?

ALEX GIBNEY: Elon Musk refused to talk to me, so we needed a workaround. And, of course, we could have just used archival clips, but I felt that, for all sorts of thematic reasons, it might be interesting and fun to go in a different direction. We assembled a massive database of everything that he had ever said — audio, video, outtakes from documentaries, all sorts of stuff. And then, one of the things that came up in that database was that he perseverated over and over and over again about this idea that we might be living in — or, we were likely living in a simulation, a simulation run by either an advanced AI or an alien civilization in the future, which had harvested all knowledge from planet Earth and was now running kind of an existential video game. So, he believes strongly that that is likely. So, given that, I thought, “OK, let’s play an Elon’s sandbox,” and we created an Elon Musk avatar to visually mouth his own words that we had collected and to substitute for an interview.

And we purposely designed it so that he, like I am doing now, is looking right into the barrel of the lens, looking, therefore, at the audience, and speaking things that he did in fact say. And we try to, you know, in terms of what he said, try to use statements that were forceful and also directly related to the subject at hand in the narrative. I thought it was important to do that not only because of this simulation idea, but when it comes to Musk, there is a constant blurring of what is real and what is unreal, and that this avatar would really reach into that idea. And going back to AI, I think that we’re all facing now this discomfiting notion that AIs learn to sort of guess what we’re thinking or imagining, and invest in trying to please us. And so, this kind of transference that takes place with a machine is also something that I thought might be interesting to explore by housing what Elon Musk says in an avatar. And by the way, I think you know, our avatar makes Elon look pretty good. I mean, he’s buff, a lot more buff than he’s looking right now. And it just seemed a kind of playful way to get at some of these issues that relate to Elon Musk’s troubled relationship with the truth.

AMY GOODMAN: What about with drugs? There is one reference to it, but according to The New York Times, Musk engaged in extensive drug consumption when one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, taking ketamine so frequently it caused bladder problems, traveling with a daily supply of something like 20 pills. What did you find?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, we didn’t go too deep into that, except to, you know, remind people of The Wall Street Journal's reporting, which has not been undermined by anything that Elon Musk has said or done, which indicates that not only is he using ketamine, but he's also — there’s also a toxic mix of cocaine, LSD and a number of other drugs. So, this goes to the question of whether or not, you know, he’s stable. And if he’s self-medicating, is he self-medicating in a reckless way that is making his actions extremely erratic, chaotic? Add to that, you know, his obsession and addiction, I would say, with tweeting, sometimes tweeting as much as 150 times a day, on a platform which he himself has tweaked to become a kind of rage-inducing environment, and you have a very toxic stew. I think that’s the important thing to remember here.

AMY GOODMAN: You interview Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk. You don’t talk as much about Elon Musk’s background, growing up in South Africa, and his relationship with apartheid South Africa. Can you talk about that now?

ALEX GIBNEY: I mean, it’s a fact that he grew up in apartheid South Africa. I didn’t lean too deeply on it, except to say it’s part of this overall mix. You didn’t see so much of that surface during the Barack Obama administration, but you’re certainly seeing a lot of racist tweets from Elon Musk now. So, I think whether it’s because he has a newfound affinity for MAGA and is sort of embracing its worst values, or is it a hangover from his days in apartheid South Africa, it’s hard to be certain, except that we know the direction he’s going. And it’s not only a direction, you know, an increasingly racist direction, but also he’s investing in very violent, seemingly anti-immigrant political parties overseas — Tommy Robinson in the U.K., AfD in Germany — and also authoritarian regimes overseas. So, there is a kind of political project for him, but I think it does center around this notion that he wants to be able to favor the kind of people that he likes, and also he wants governments that are increasingly transactional.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, he went to Russia early on, you point out, when it came to SpaceX, wondering why the U.S. program and the rockets cost so much money, and so much less money in Russia. But I’d like to ask you about Russia and also Ukraine and Starlink. If you can talk about its significance and how he’s used his power with Starlink against Ukraine?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, it’s interesting, because Starlink, I think you could fairly say, also greatly advantaged Ukraine. In fact, there are a number of Ukrainian military who talk about how Musk’s Starlink was hugely helpful to them on the battlefield. And yet we also know at critical moments that he was talking directly to Putin, and also shut down Starlink or refused to turn it on in the Crimea when — in Crimea, when, you know, Ukraine was about to launch an attack, and also in the Donbas at critical moments. I think the more — the most troubling thing about this whole episode is you have an individual, untethered from any government control, who’s personally deciding when and how the war should be fought in Ukraine. He’s a one-person foreign policy when it comes to Ukraine because of his control of this technology. To me, that’s the most troubling thing.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you explain what Starlink is, and also Starlink at the White House?

ALEX GIBNEY: So, Starlink is, effectively, a satellite internet system. In other words, instead of connecting to a coaxial cable somewhere or fiber lines, you literally have a dish that connects you with a satellite up above. And I should say that for airlines and for remote rural areas or for the battlefield in Ukraine, it’s an extremely effective technology. It’s not, in an urban environment, nearly as good as fiber, but Elon Musk is pushing it as if it is. And indeed, he’s got the State Department to sort of muscle governments overseas to buy Starlink, even though it’s not necessarily that effective in urban environments.

There’s a couple of interesting things about Starlink, though, that I think we should focus on. First of all, unlike the internet, where it’s end-to-end transmission, if you’re in, say — I don’t know — Omaha, and you’re sending an email to somebody in New York, your signal goes up to a satellite, goes to SpaceX, and then, from SpaceX, goes up to a satellite near New York, and then is beamed down. That’s very interesting, because it means all that data is flowing through SpaceX. And, of course, you know, as AI becomes better and better at foiling encryption, that could become increasingly problematic.

And that’s one of the things I thought that was problematic about the fact that during the Trump administration, suddenly there was a SpaceX technician — not a government technician, but a SpaceX technician — installing Starlink in the White House system. And I posit in the film: Was that so — you know, did that mean that now Elon Musk is listening to what the White House has to say? You know, because it wasn’t necessary for that to happen for the White House to have secure communication. In fact, it made the White House communication less secure.

ALEX GIBNEY: In fact, you have Ashley St. Clair raising the same kinds of questions when she talked about Elon Musk leaving early on election night, and when she said, “Do you know? It looks like he’s going to win,” and he said, “Yes, I know,” and referred to 10,000 lasers.

ALEX GIBNEY: In space, yeah, and that was referring to Starlink. I mean, that’s when he sent her a number of text messages saying, “I found an” — you know, when she was wondering how he could know for certain that Trump was going to win, well before, you know, it was announced by anybody, he said, “Well, I found an anomaly in the matrix. And after all, I have 10,000 lasers in space,” presumably referring to Starlink. Ashley said in text at the time, “I would ask more, but I don’t want to be deposed.” And Elon Musk responded back, “Wise.”

Now, we don’t know exactly what that meant, to be honest with you. And I extremely doubt that — and it’s been debunked, that Starlink could actually change votes. But it’s clear, or it seems clear, that he had unusual advance notice of who was going to win, in ways that should be concerning to us in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: You interview Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of his many children. He’s, as you call him, a pronatalist, at least 14 children that we know of. You also interview Justine Musk, who is the mother of Vivian Wilson, who is Elon Musk’s oldest and trans daughter, who he thoroughly rejected. Can you talk about that relationship and the belief that that may have led to his political transformation and his vicious attacks on what he calls anything woke?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, I think you could say that the personal is political, and that the transition of his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, may have taken him down that political path. But I think it’s too simple to sort of blame his political transformation on that. He’s — it became a kind of — once he had started to go right, and I think he started to go right during the pandemic, you know, his anger over his child doing something that he didn’t like becomes part of his stated political project, and he starts launching anti-trans ads, and so forth and so on.

It’s very moving in the film to hear Justine Musk, Vivian Jenna Wilson’s mother, talk about how, you know, this is a child, you know, because Musk had famously said, “My son Xavier is dead,” using the deadname for Vivian. And Justine Musk in the film talks very movingly about how, you know, that was hard for her to hear, because they themselves had gone through the death of a child, one of — their first kid died of SIDS, and that this is not the death of a child. Vivian Jenna Wilson is a dynamic young woman who’s a very, you know, interesting character. This is a child growing up. And inevitably, when children grow up, they move away from their parents, and that’s part of the growing up process. So, Musk’s — you know, he is obsessed with maintaining control over his personal relationships, and also that kind of personal obsession with control is something that you see spill out into his professional enterprises, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: As we begin to wrap up, talk about Musk’s fury when you call X “Twitter.” Right? He took — he bought Twitter and renamed it X. You show him throwing out — his people throwing out the bird, and his rage when he tweeted something that President Biden also tweeted about, but Biden got more views than Musk did, and that’s what ignited his fury.

ALEX GIBNEY: It’s so interesting, the purchase of Twitter, because I think, in some ways, he made an offer for Twitter almost as a kind of a joke. You know, his — Talulah Riley, his wife or his girlfriend at the time — I can’t remember exactly the timing — said, you know, “What they’re doing there is not free speech. You should take it over.” So he launches a bid, way overpriced, but because he was so reckless with his bid, he was forced to live up to the bid that he made. He buys it, almost destroys it by firing 80% of the workforce, but then discovers that he has this propaganda platform, and he begins to tweak it.

And one of those key moments when he starts to tweak it to become increasingly a propaganda platform is he and Biden are both tweeting over the Super Bowl, because they were both interested in the Philadelphia Eagles. But Biden is getting much more engagement online than he is. So, he immediately flies into a rage. He flies his private jet back to San Francisco, and he gets the engineers to work through the night to tweak the algorithms at Twitter, or X. And so, the next morning, everybody woke up and looked on their phones, and all they could see were Elon Musk tweets, you know, because he had overdone it, just the way he overdid it with MechaHitler.

But you can see how these social media platforms work. You know, you can tweak them to get what you want. And suddenly he realized, “Oh my gosh, this is the opportunity to remake Twitter into a — into X, which is now going to become my personal propaganda platform, that I will also, you know, put at the service of various foreign dictators.”

AMY GOODMAN: Alex Gibney, what most shocked you in this investigation you have done, in this documentary you have made about Elon Musk?

ALEX GIBNEY: Perhaps the thing that shocked me the most is an interview, an archival interview, that we included toward the end of the film. There is an interviewer who’s asking Elon Musk, when he’s talking about the sort of the fully integrated power that he now commands with Starlink and SpaceX and xAI and X, you know, why that globe-encircling power is so important to him. And Musk stumbles. I mean, you know, over a minute, a minute and a half, he literally can’t answer the question. It reminded me of when, long ago, somebody asked Ted Kennedy, “Why are you running for president?” He couldn’t answer. But here you have a man with maybe, arguably, except for Donald Trump, more power than anybody on the planet, and he can’t answer the fundamental question of why. So, that’s power not only without accountability, but without reason. And that, to me, was the most chilling thing that I discovered.

President Donald Trump has been extremely powerful since the start of his second term due in part to the compliance of the Republican-controlled Supreme Court and Congress. Democrats hope that they can rein Trump in by first taking over Congress and then appointing more Supreme Court justices — but a Supreme Court expert is arguing that, at least while Trump is in office, there is not in fact much they can do to stop him.

"Democrats controlled the House in the last two years of Mr. Trump’s first term, and he was able to stonewall most attempts at meaningful oversight," wrote The New York Times' Jeffrey Toobin on Sunday. "He refused to comply with subpoenas and fought enforcement in the courts, where he exploited the inevitable delays that come with appeals to run out the clock on his term."

Toobin added, "To cite just two examples, the House Oversight Committee sued over access to information about the census, and the case ended with President Joe Biden providing the information over two years later. The Ways and Means Committee sued to obtain Mr. Trump’s tax returns, and the Biden administration settled that case, too — nearly four years after it began."

In addition to Congress lacking the tools to force Trump to work with them, the Supreme Court has empowered Trump more than any president in American history, Toobin wrote.

"Even better for President Trump, the law is now more skewed toward the executive branch, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States," Toobin wrote. "Its main holding was that former presidents, including Mr. Trump, enjoy absolute criminal immunity for actions in connection with their core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. In short, the president could not be criminally prosecuted for any 'official' actions he undertook while in office."

Toobin continued, "There is also language in Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion that suggests the president cannot even be investigated for his official actions."

Toobin even said that Congress, though empowered to defund the war in Iran, cannot automatically end it through this action.

"But even that power has important limitations," Toobin said. "Congress cannot usually block the use of previously appropriated dollars, and given the vast size of the Pentagon budget, the administration can surely use existing funds to keep paying for that war. Even more to the point, the federal budget — with any restrictions that Democrats might seek to attach — is subject to a presidential veto. Following any plausible outcome of the midterms, the chances are remote that two-thirds of the lawmakers in each house will vote to override any of President Trump’s vetoes."

Toobin said that the only way to address this is to stop Republicans from retaining control of the Supreme Court.

"When Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016 with nearly a year left in President Barack Obama’s term, Senator Mitch McConnell, then the leader of the Republican majority, refused to hold hearings or a vote on Mr. Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Democrats can — and must — return the favor if Mr. Trump tries to fill a seat on the court in his final two years in office," Toobin wrote. "Democrats should exercise that power because it’s the right thing to do, but also because they are going to have little power to do much else."

Earlier in October, however, Toobin expressed alarm that the Supreme Court seems to plan on allowing Trump to decide who gets to vote in the 2028 presidential election.

"Last month, the Supreme Court gave tentative approval to one of the administration’s attempts to ferret out improperly registered voters, including noncitizens," Toobin wrote at the time for The New York Times. "The Department of Homeland Security decided to expand a database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, which for almost four decades has allowed federal, state and local government agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits using biographic and other details. Under the Trump expansion, the database added Social Security records, and the administration invited localities to use it to make bulk demands to determine eligibility for voting, not just benefits."

Elizabeth Holmes, the famously eccentric billionaire now serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, is fascinating less because of her crimes than because of the mystery surrounding her perception of them. Scams in health companies are a dime a dozen, and Holmes' Theranos is notable only because it targeted many of the rich and powerful. Yet Holmes stands out for another reason: She doggedly insists that she is wrongly accused.

In "You Can See Everything," a documentary co-directed by and starring Nathan Fielder as he receives unfettered access to Holmes shortly before she goes to prison, does not illuminate the mystery behind Holmes. At the end, she stands as staunchly as ever by not only her self-proclaimed innocence, but by other questionable aspects of her past — and, for that matter, her current life choices. Instead "You Can See Everything" is intriguing precisely because it never reveals anything about Holmes. It simply shows her as she is, and then gives the viewer enough distance from the subject to encourage them to reach their own conclusions.

But that is not all it does. Part-way through the film, Holmes begins her prison sentence, but the story is far from over. Her husband Billy Evans makes a long-foreshadowed heel turn, exercising controlling behavior over Holmes and causing Fielder and actress Amanda Seyfried, who plays Holmes in the mini-series "The Dropout," to accuse Evans of exploiting her. Like its analysis of Holmes' self-honesty, "You Can See Everything" never resolves the questions about the Holmes-Evans relationship. It merely observes from a distance, or with Seyfried cleverly and uncannily reprising her role as Holmes.

The most important theme of "You Can See Everything" is that objective reality is never particularly important to the people with the most power. They occupy a world in which merely believing something to be true often seems to literally make that things true. When we see Holmes display these delusional traits in the lead-up to her prison sentence, it becomes easy to see how she could create a multibillion dollar company based on a promise — that it could run comprehensive blood tests with just a few drops of blood — that she never had the ability to deliver on.

Because people like Holmes continue to exert power over our lives, "You Can See Everything" winds up being about a lot more than one particular scammer. Holmes embodies the sense of entitlement and willful delusions of that class of humanity that can create mega-corporations based on hype. We see it in AI CEOs who continue to develop a technology that they plausibly believe could destroy humanity, or at least create an uninhabitable economy. We see it also in the MAHA movement, which perhaps not surprisingly has embraced Holmes' victim narrative. As Kathryn Olivarius, a historian at Stanford University writing a book on the MAHA movement, told Politico last year that "she’s such a perfect martyr for this. It feels almost inevitable that this would happen.There’s something in her story for everyone in this movement… You can always frame it so that you know she’s somehow being victimized here.”

Before reporters at The Wall Street Journal and federal investigators exposed her, Holmes had caused massive unnecessary suffering. Theranos falsely reported miscarriages, recommended blood-thinners for a patient who ddi not need them and diagnosed patients incorrectly with deadly ailments like prostate cancer and heart attacks. While the scope of Theranos' crimes will likely never be known, Arizona found that roughly 10 percent of its blood test results had to be corrected or voided from 2013 to 2016. Holmes also squashed dissenters and whistleblowers and harmed businesses like Walgreens and Safeway that trusted her. Holmes and her business partner Sunny Balwani were later ordered to pay roughly $452 million in restitution jointly or separately, of which almost $398 million went to losses from 12 Theranos investors.

There were harsh real-world consequences for Holmes' delusions, and "You Can See Everything" to its credit never loses sight of that. Quite to the contrary, it tries almost desperately to get Holmes to accept accountability, to show sincere empathy in any meaningful way to her victims. The task is doomed to failure, though — even Fielder seems painfully aware of that — and this movie tells the story of the entertaining way it is unable to get a scammer to see straight.

Full disclosure: When I discuss "The Handmaid's Tale," I'm describing the 2017-2025 TV series and not the 1985 novel. While I immensely respect Margaret Atwood both as an artist and as a political/social critic, I confess that reading "The Handmaid's Tale" remains on my bucket list.

Yet none of this means I can't effectively describe how "The Handmaid's Tale" is relevant to the present: While I can't determine if the TV series is better than book, I join millions who only saw the former in saying it makes recognize just how disturbingly it foresaw President Donald Trump's America.

First, there is the misogyny, one that does not spare even women who back Trump. Thanks to Trump's policies, women have lost the constitutional right to an abortion, found it harder to seek protections from harassment and abuse at the workplace and making it harder for low-income families to receive reproductive and cancer-related health care. The premise of "The Handmaid's Tale also strikes a chord for another, more scientifically inescapable reason. Even though Trump supporters urge increased procreation to address falling fertility rates, they refuse to accept that the president's opposition to environmental regulations is precisely why sperm counts are dropping in the first place. From pesticides to plastic pollution, corporations dump chemicals known as "endocrine disruptors" into our ecosystem, so much so that every human being alive has at least a handful of microplastics and pesticide chemicals in their bodies.

Is it that much of a stretch to see the leaps from this political movement and set of environmental circumstances, and the plight of the women in Gilead?

Show creator and executive producer Bruce Miller has openly acknowledged that the TV show leans into themes about humans being irresponsible with our scientific knowledge.

"The background noise of the book is all the things we’re talking about now," Miller told Variety in 2020. "They’re functions of climate change. We’re seeing diseases that are a condition of climate change and lack of sustainability. COVID is an example of that. In the book, it’s a plague of sexually transmitted diseases. The shifting foundation of the environment is very much underneath what’s happening in Gilead."

Of course, in "The Handmaid's Tale," the same misogynists who brutalized and controlled women in order to address their fertility crisis at least understood that plastic and pesticide pollution, climate change and other unsustainable environmental practices are dangerous. In the Trump world, the misogynists refuse to stop the use of chemicals destroying our species' collective sperm count.

"Gilead is a counterpoint to what else is going on," Miller said. "One of the things we try to show is that Gilead often has noble goals even though they have absolutely horrendous ways of trying to reach them. They’d like to clean up the environment. They believe that from a religious point of view, the earth is a gift from God. A lot of the show is about how Gilead has made progress in sustainability. Almost all the cars are hybrid in Gilead. That means for us that road noise in the sound mix is much lower because those cars are quieter. … Every year we try to add a few more birds to the mix of bird sounds on the show. Bird populations that had been suppressed would be starting to come back in Gilead. You want the birds to sound like what it would if the earth was a little more sustainable."

He concluded, "What we’re showing in Gilead is a fascist totalitarian reaction to a real problem."

In short, we may be headed toward a future like "The Handmaid's Tale," but worse.

President Donald Trump is struggling in the polls right now due to the economy — but not, as it turns out, due only to inflation.

"Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, had fallen to about 3 percent when Mr. Trump returned to office, from a peak of 9 percent in 2022," New York Times' chief economics correspondent Ben Casselman wrote on Sunday. "Most economists expected it to drop further."

Casselman added, "Instead, progress stalled in 2025, partly because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which drove up prices of many imported goods. Then, just as the tariff effect was beginning to fade, Mr. Trump led the United States into war with Iran, which pushed energy prices and inflation back up. Consumer prices were up 3.7 percent in September from a year earlier."

Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told Casselman that “voters had the sense that President Biden’s policies were leading to higher prices, and voters have the sense that President Trump’s policies are leading to higher prices now. In both cases, I think voters made the right judgment.”

"Gas prices are just the most visible piece of a broader affordability challenge," Casselman wrote. "Record prices for diesel fuel are threatening to ripple through to food and other goods. The artificial intelligence boom has led to a surge in demand for computer chips and related equipment, which has raised costs for smartphones, tablets and other consumer electronics. And some economists say they believe companies are still waiting to pass along some of the cost of tariffs to customers."

Trump's trade war with Canada is particularly responsible for recent price increases, as America's longtime ally is retaliating against Trump's rhetoric and practices by slapping tariffs on a wide range of commonly-consumed goods. He has also exacerbated inflation by invading Iran, which has retaliated by closing down the Strait of Hormuz and thereby driving up oil prices.

“What Navarro said kind of demonstrates that he doesn't understand markets,” Dr. Robert J. Shapiro, a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, told AlterNe in March. “If there is a risk premium, it's only for oil futures — not for the price of oil today, not for the spot price — and then only when the risk is imminent. And so the price of oil rose by $10 in the runup to the launch of the war on Iran, which shows that it's not baked in.” Laughing, Shapiro added “these are commodities that are bought, sold and traded every day. They have a daily price, and the price reflects the supply and demand that day — and indeed in the morning, midday, afternoon or evening. So the notion that it was already built in is also clearly refuted by the fact that the price rose."

Conservative pundit and Dispatch Editor-in-Chief Jonah Goldberg says he’s figured out one of President Donald Trump’s most fatal flaws: he’s an entertainer, not a president.

“What I mean is that if you start to see your job as telling fans what they want to hear, you risk becoming an entertainer rather than a thinker, and eventually you become a caricature,” said Goldberg in the Fulcrum.

It’s the Trump trap that’s also managed to nab the careers of once-respectable conservative pundits, said Goldberg.

“In journalism — or what passes for it — you can see the same arc most acutely in talk radio and TV hosts, who define their roles as telling the audience what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to hear,” said Goldberg. “In the early Trump era, many prominent pundits were fairly conventional conservatives. When the audience veered towards populism and MAGA, the hosts followed [them],” in pursuit of an audience.

But that’s just entertainers. The situation gets worse when an entertainer takes that route to politics.

“Politicians often are captured by their true-believing base,” said Goldberg. “It’s most commonly seen among ‘conviction’ politicians, who make a name for themselves on a single issue or idea. Congressman and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s deep populist support was enough to earn him the Democratic nomination three times (1896, 1900 and 1908), but his support wasn’t wide enough to ever win.”

The same held true for segregationist candidates like George Wallace, socialists like Norman Thomas, and Patrick Buchanan. Sarah Palin, Bernie Sanders, Kari Lake and Ron Paul represent more recent cautionary tales, he said.

The trap is sweetened by ego, he warned, and some egos are bigger than others by far: “Politicians see huge crowds or read favorable media coverage and assume their people are the people.”

Lake, for example, thought she didn’t need John McCain Republicans to win her 2022 bid for an Arizona U.S. Senate seat. Nor did she think she needed support from the Democrats and independents who voted for McCain, because she mistook “intensity of support for quantity of support.”

But MAGA are loud. They are not plentiful.

“Jesse Watters, a reliable water-carrier for President Trump, is Fox News’ most popular prime-time host, averaging about 2.7 million viewers per night,” said Goldberg, but that means on any given night, roughly 346 million Americans aren’t watching. “But if you’re Trump, you might think Watters is representative of the American people.

Watters’ audience matters because GOP primary voters and small donors are more likely to watch his show, but he said primary voters are a small fraction of the greater electorate.

Still, politicians like Trump are orienting themselves to “small, intense slices of the electorate,” said Goldberg. And the polarizing dynamic is further intensified by social media.

“Politicians and activists mistake the ‘vibes’ of X and TikTok for the real world. They become intensely ‘online’ and responsive to the feedback they’re fed by social media algorithms,” Goldberg said.

President Donald Trump's White House is once again embroiled in chaos after the abrupt departure of his new press secretary, and now, his one-time biographer has predicted the "inevitable" next firing from the administration.

Within the span of a work week, right-wing commentator Katie Zacharia made her debut as White House press secretary in a disastrously bad briefing, was caught out for false claims about being a lawyer and was pushed out of the office after just five days. The whole affair exposed a new storm of chaos underway within the White House, with subsequent reports suggesting that Trump hired Zacharia without input from Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and might now be looking to replace Wiles herself.

Michael Wolff is a longtime author and reporter, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career, including a handful of books about his hectic first term. In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, he and co-host Joanna Coles discussed the continued fallout from Zacharia's firing, with Wolff arguing that what happened to her ultimately was not her own fault.

"Poor Katie Zechariah. It's not really her fault. It's Donald Trump's fault," Wolff said. "He picked her out of nowhere without preparation. Was she a lawyer? Was she an attorney? What is the difference between lawyer and attorney? What are those bar exams in China like? So, no one has clearly asked those questions, because Trump said, 'Oh, yeah, look, I like the way she looks.'"

Wolff further explained that the president's decision to go around Wiles in hiring Zacharia was another sign that "Trump wants Trump in charge," and "resents" the suggestion that anyone else but him is running the shop in the White House. Looked at from that angle, he also suggested that the whole ordeal makes it clear that there is a better-than-good, almost "inevitable" chance that Wiles will be the next person from the Trump administration.

"I would say it's a pretty good chance, maybe a fair chance... and maybe inevitable that Susie Wiles goes," Wolff said.

Wolff later dismissed Coles' suggestion that Wiles might throw her support behind Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a 2028 presidential contender, potentially making her the first "chief of staff to two different presidents." He also added during this exchange that a surprising member of Wiles' family has emerged as a major force in the Trump White House.

"She's brought her daughter into her orbit," Wolff explained. "And her daughter has become a kind of a, you know, a power within the White House, within the Trump circle. Someone you don't want to cross is Susie Wiles' daughter."

Recent reports have suggested that Katie Wiles maintains close relationships within Russia by way of her political lobbying firm, Continental Strategy.