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The Trump White House is descending into a "bloody" pressure cooker, according to a one-time biographer of the president, with everyone out to get as much as they can "while the getting is good" before things come to a grinding halt.

Michael Wolff is a longtime author and reporter, best known for his extensive coverage of President Donald Trump's political career, including several books about his chaotic first term in the White House. In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," Wolff and co-host Joanna Coles at one point discussed the scandal surrounding Trump's former personal attorney and failed U.S. Attorney attack dog, Alina Habba Mildon, who received a $50 million contract to serve as general counsel for the family of a Venezuelan billionaire, shortly before a member of the family received a clemency deal from the White House.

As Wolff argued, the Trump White House has been behaving like any other authoritarian government, with a bunch of bit players using access to the "central power in the middle" to make money or pursue other personal goals.

"But that's what so many other people around Donald Trump are also doing," Wolff explained. "And this is going to get more intense as... the end comes for the Trump administration. And... the feeling may be that it is ending much sooner [than anticipated], with Tuesday's election... that everybody is going to be so much more focused on getting what they can while the getting is good, which is going to increase the pressure, increase the resentment, increase the competition around Trump. And it's going to be bloody."

On the subject of impending GOP doom in the midterms, Wolff suggested that Trump's recent attempt to back out of several planned rallies might have come down to him getting tired, and the fact that "if he decides he doesn't want to do it, it's very hard to get him to do it."

"It's very hard to get him to focus. I mean, you don't tell Trump what to do," Wolff said. "And, and if he got to the point of saying, I don't want to do this anymore, then you don't do it."

He continued: "Now, in this case, he was pressured. I mean, the entire Republican Party comes and says, 'Come on... We're really in an every last vote situation. I mean, you have one job, Mr. President, and that's to get your base to come out and vote'... You're certainly not going to change the minds, at this point, of Democrats or independents or people who have once voted for you and now hate you."

A prominent New York Times columnist pulled no punches while discussing President Donald Trump's main new pretense for election meddling, calling out the White House for harping on about "a fake problem made up by losers."

In a recent edition of his "Takes" video series on YouTube, liberal NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie discussed the Trump administration's recent attempt to target "noncitizen voters," with a new demand that California purge names of suspected noncitizens from its ballot prior to the election. The state's government hit back, claiming that there would be no way to inspect the voter rolls in time for Election Day, and that trying to do so would inevitably result in law-abiding voters getting purged by mistake.

Bouie argued that there was no merit to this line of attack from Trump, accusing the administration of merely trying to prop up an excuse to delegitimize the eventual results out of California after the midterms. More to the point, however, he also went scorched earth against the idea that noncitizen voting was anything close to a real problem, let alone one warranting a massive mobilization by the federal government.

"I think it's actually very reasonable for someone who isn't paying a ton of attention and doesn't know a ton to assume that the U.S. has a problem with non-citizens voting in federal elections, but I'm here to tell you that that's wrong. Just completely and totally wrong," Bouie explained. "Over the last decade, any number of groups, organizations and the like have done detailed studies of non-citizen voting, trying to find out what is the actual amount of non-citizen voting that happens in the United States, and the consistent answer no matter who you ask is that there is effectively none. Statistically equivalent to zero."

He continued: "I use those terms effectively and statistically zero because it's important to remember that in any given election year there are tens of millions of votes being cast; in a presidential election year, those numbers are north of a hundred and fifty 160 million votes. And so when you have that many people voting in that many places, there is bound to be some instance of something, basically anything. The question is whether it's prevalent, whether it's common, whether it happens at a frequency high enough that would justify actions that might disenfranchise completely legal voters and the answer to that question is no; it doesn't. It happens so infrequently that it's effectively the same as it not happening at all."

Bouie further cited a 2016 study from the Brennan Center for Justice, which found that out of around 23.5 million votes cast in 42 jurisdictions, only about 30 instances of non-citizen voting could be found, a percentage that of the total votes cast that was ultimately negligible, and far from a trend that could meaningfully shift a race.

"My odds right now of being struck by lightning three times in a row, higher than the rate of non-citizen voting, according to [the conservative Heritage Foundation's] data," Bouie added.

President Donald Trump has a new fixation occupying his time that has Washington, D.C., locals terrified, and it is one that The Daily Beast likened to his own personal "Make-a-Wish" gift.

On Thursday, Trump ordered a flyover of the White House of his new Qatari-gifted Air Force One, as part of a Halloween event where the children of his top officials were present. The administration's social media presence touted the flyover as an "epic" stunt "for the trick-or-treaters" in attendance, while a Washington Post report noted that "In a city that still vividly remembers the deadly 2025 crash near Reagan National Airport and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the flyover caused some concern."

In the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, host Joanna Coles and executive editor Hugh Dougherty discussed the incident and its fallout, with Dougherty noting that no one in the administration had given the government of the District of Columbia advance warning about the "Grift Force One" flyover.

"The Council and the District of Columbia, the legislature, has put out a statement saying, 'What on Earth is going on?'" Dougherty said. "There was a ground stop [at Reagan International Airport] for half an hour... Nobody knew. United and Delta and American [Airlines], that fly from there, had no idea. And they said, 'Oh, sorry. We've got a ground stop for what's described as an executive move or maneuver, and that usually means Marine One is on its way to Andrews Air Force Base. No, it was the biggest plane that Boeing has ever produced flying at maybe 500 feet over the White House, because it was Halloween and the Miller and Hegseth children were getting their candy."

In response, Coles called the flyover another example of how the country is dealing with "an administration of one man who wants to do what he wants to do, and the hell with the rest of us." Dougherty further explained how Trump has become "obsessed" with flyovers since his return to office.

"We all remember July the 4th, where he basically took over the airspace in D.C. and... people are like, 'Oh, I enjoy it. Who doesn't enjoy a fly-past?," Dougherty continued. "And [then] they're like, 'Oh, there's another one, another one, another one.' Their dogs were howling, their children were crying.... He has become obsessed by the idea that he can get Air Force One — particularly, he loves showing off this gold plane — to do a fly-past. He goes to stadium, they do a fly-past over the stadium. We saw that on some of his tours down to college football. He sits in the White House and he says, 'I'm going to have some people around. know I'll get Air Force One to fly over.' It's an obsession. It's like a Make-a-Wish president."

Coles added in response: "I'm not sure how much people have connected this. Maybe they think, 'Oh, it's just military budget, military spending.' It's actually taxpayers dollars going into keeping Donald Trump entertained, because as he gets older, it takes more to keep him entertained."

MS NOW analyst Hayes Brown says President Donald Trump doesn’t have a problem with corruption. Trump loves corruption, actually. He adores it. What he hates, however, is corruption that doesn’t give him a cut.

“Trump’s jealousy over money that he feels was unfairly earned on his coattails is legendary,” said Brown. “Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital strategist in 2016 and campaign manager in 2020, raked in millions via his strategy company’s contracts with Trump-affiliated groups. ‘That’s my money!’ Trump reportedly exclaimed after learning about the high-spending lifestyle Parscale had cultivated.”

Parscale was demoted in July 2020, and he abandoned the administration before Election Day.

Trump’s former personal lawyer (and not-quite AG) Alina Habba Mildon, similarly, was the latest to draw the president’s ire for “profiting off her place in his orbit,” said Brown.

Mildon allegedly signed a $50 million contract last year to serve as general counsel for a billionaire Venezuelan family, just weeks away from a family member nabbing a clemency deal from Trump. But Trump allegedly grumbled to aides and allies that Mildon should donate a portion of her money “to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity, according to multiple people briefed on the conversations.”

In another recent example, 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and adviser James Blair caught fire from Trump for their political work in a Balkan territory whose nationalist government is aligned with Russia.

“This side hustle taking their focus off the U.S. midterms was bad enough, but the hundreds of thousands of dollars they each reportedly earned certainly didn’t help matters,” said Brown. … Trump threatened to cut LaCivita and Blair off entirely but allowed them back into his good graces through an act of, as the president put it to reporters last week, ‘charity.’ Again, the two men donated the money they made consulting to the Trump presidential library, according to social media posts.

“The money flowing to his presidential library instead of his businesses or personal bank account makes it no less of a racket,” said Brown. “There still have been no good answers as to where millions of dollars pledged to the library went after the initial fund was dissolved last year. … A sitting president even considering a tithe of this nature from a former staffer necessary is shocking, but it fits perfectly into Trump’s zero sum understanding of the world.”

But Trump’s personal brand is a money-maker, said Brown, and licensing some of that clout for dirty deeds requires Trump wetting his beak on a share of the gains.

“The alternative is risking Trump harnessing the full power of his office to collect what he sees as his due,” Brown concluded.

One of President Donald Trump's most prominent and most controversial Cabinet officials will almost certainly face an impeachment push if and when Democrats take over Congress, and according to a new piece from The Hill, he may already be eyeing a "parachute" to help escape his fate.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already been threatened with the prospect of being impeached, with anti-Trump Republican Rep. Thomas Massie introducing articles against him earlier this year. The eight articles against Hegseth largely stemmed from his role overseeing the Iran war.

With Democrats expected to sweep back into power in next week's midterm elections, momentum is growing for impeachment proceedings against not just Trump, but also many of his top Cabinet officials, with Hegseth being near the top of the list for many. In a piece published Saturday morning, however, The Hill explained that an opening in the Senate could be his planned escape hatch to avoid being forced out of office by Democratic accountability.

As the piece laid out, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn is currently the GOP nominee for governor in Tennessee and is solidly leading in the polls against her competitors. If elected, she would be empowered to choose her own replacement in the Senate once she took office. Sources within the Pentagon now say that Hegseth is heavily considering a push for the position, with some calling the plan an "open secret."

"Hegseth, a former Army National Guard Major, is interested in the open Tennessee Senate seat, which expires in early 2031, two sources familiar with the matter told The Hill," the report detailed. "A third source with knowledge of the conversations said Hegseth is campaigning behind the scenes for the post. A fourth who works closely with the Pentagon said his interest is an open secret."

It continued: "Questions are swirling inside the Pentagon over how long Hegseth lasts after the midterms even if he’s not impeached, according to two sources regularly in the building. The defense secretary is widely seen as one of the Iran war’s biggest boosters in the administration. That could become a liability if Republicans are left looking for people to blame after what polls suggest could be a painful midterms for the party, driven in part by the economic consequences of the war."

Hegseth, a National Guard veteran and former Fox News personality, previously ran for Senate in his home state of Minnesota in 2012, but failed to advance beyond the GOP primary. As of 2022, he owns a home outside Nashville in the town of Goodlettsville, Tennessee, setting himself up for a potential push to take that state's vacant Senate seat.

"If Trump ends up looking for a new defense secretary, the administration is struggling to decide who it should be, this source said," The Hill's report added. "In the Senate, Democrats are quietly floating Hegseth’s ouster after the midterms, using the threat as leverage in defense spending talks with the White House, The Hill previously reported. The Democrats might have some Republican support."

He was one of the evangelicals who set the foundation for the MAGA-tization of a Christian movement, but today the Guardian reports that Donald Trump’s most influential Christian nationalist backer is quiet about rallying supporters for the Republican Party before the midterms. Instead, he’s urging them to find a successor to Charlie Kirk and “focusing on their own diets.”

“At the ‘As One’ weekend for paying ‘partners’ in the Dallas-Fort Worth area earlier this month, Lance Wallnau, one of the first prominent rightwing evangelicals to back Trump in 2015, spoke across three sessions about the virtues of El Salvador’s prison system, school boards and the movement’s future. The midterms, then little more than three weeks away, were not mentioned once,” reports the Guardian.

Wallnau, 70, is a captain in evangelical circles. He co-authored the book Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate, urging Christians to commandeer society, government, media, education and business. He was one of Trump’s earliest champions. He has a thing for hard-right dictators, like El Salvador's authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele. He also approves of Eastern European nations Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, all of which have endured hard-right political surges in recent years.

But the Guardian reports Wallnau has recently hit a more subdued tone as midterms threaten to shake the Republican Party to its foundation. Much of his new message now pertains to coping with failure.

“We all have a certain responsibility … but you can’t be responsible for the whole nation,” he recently said at an event, while referring to the elections. “You’ve done your job. Your conscience is clear, and whatever comes out in the midterms is going to be. We’ll sort that out when it happens.”

Now Wallnau urges followers to avoid politics and focus on themselves: “When you’re dealing with something you don’t like, something that isn’t working, something that isn’t clear, there’s some seed of a greater benefit that can come out of that … maybe it’s going to be lifestyle, or maybe it’s going to be diet.”

Behind closed doors, the Guardian reports Wallnau also admits the MAGA movement is struggling to appeal to young people, and he urged supporters to think about “building a post-Trump infrastructure, with leaders who will outlast the president.”

Concordia University professor André Gagné, who has studied Wallnau, said the spiritual leader’s sudden silence on the midterms reflected strains in Trump’s coalition, even from some of his earliest, and most victorious, backers.

“There’s fractures in the movement,” said Gagné. “My sense is that Wallnau feels he has to tread very carefully with what he’s going to say in overly defending Trump or overly talking about the midterms.”

He added that Wallnau’s growing distance between himself and Trump is strategic, that he must “think of who is coming next,” and it explains why he is eager to point to the successful collapse of democracies in other nations helmed by Bukele in El Salvador —collapses that appear to be stalling in the U.S.

But breaking things is rather Wallnau’s point, reports the Guardian. At the gala, for example, Wallnau closed out the evening by asking attendees to stand up with him and participate in a karate chop together.

“Here’s the problem,” he said. “[If] you don’t break a board, you break your hand.”

President Donald Trump had a complete meltdown and lashed out at a reporter this week after he thought he received a question about his health, and now a psychologist has broken down what this behavior exposes about Trump's current condition.

Dr. John Paul Garrison is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a specialty in interpreting body language, who also shares numerous videos online using his professional insights to break down the behavior of notable public figures. In many of these videos, he has focused on Trump's public appearances, pointing out a growing number of signs that he is dealing with potentially significant physical and neurological decline.

In his latest video, he examined the viral footage of Trump blowing up at Reuters White House correspondent Jacob Bogage during a press scrum on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Bogage asked the president if his decision to cancel a midterm rally in Kansas was because he was "sick of traveling," to which Trump exploded in anger, saying he was "sick to ask that question," demanding to know who he worked for and disparaging him for being overweight.

Many observers have since argued that Trump appeared to have misunderstood the question, assuming that Bogage was asking him if he was under the weather, with some further theorizing that this was a sign that his health has become a sore subject.

While discussing the clip, Garrison noted that the footage of Trump lashing out at Bogage exposed two behaviors that were "very telling."

"One is that he fully faced away from the reporter after answering that, and we do that as a way to disconnect," Garrison explained. "He does not want to be facing the reporter and disconnects from him after talking about his health. Second is that when speaking about his health, he said it's 'Good, I think very good.' Now, he doesn't typically use phrases like 'I think,' because it makes it sound weak. So, to respond that way, to me, says that there is some uncertainty there and some uncertainty about how to answer that question."

A short time later in the clip, Garrison noted how Trump corrected himself while saying something similar, further suggesting that his choice of words was telling.

"You notice he even corrected his own language right there. He started to say, 'I think we're going to have a good Tuesday night,' to just being more direct and saying, 'We're going to have a good Tuesday night,'" Garrison explained. "So it's very telling that he was using the phrase 'I think.'"

The immediacy of Trump's explosion at Bogage was also a sign worthy of concern, tying into a lack of emotional control that Garrison has noticed in his behavior recently.

"And you notice the anger is so immediate," he explained. "And this is what we've talked about is that the more challenges he has managing his emotions, the more you're going to see anger, agitation, confusion, frustration. Something like this is going to come out more and more."

Even after ugly primaries, Texas Republicans usually fall in line in November to carry the GOP candidate through the election. But The Atlantic reports Republicans throughout the state are feeling that President Donald Trump has planted them at a bridge too far this time.

Forty-three-year-old Texas entrepreneur John Huffman and Hillary Shepheard say they just aren’t willing to bail the party out of its poor choices and help carry Senatorial candidate Ken Paxton or Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French over the finish line.

“Our party needs a slap in the face,” said Shepheard, adding that for the long-term survival of her party, “Ken Paxton has to lose.”

Trump, they said, has remade the Texas Republican Party in his image, transforming it into a machine built not for winning general elections, but for allowing him to “dominate poisonous primaries.” This, they warned, is delivering up some of the worst candidates to soil a Texas election.

“What we have,” said Huffman, “is a fractured set of relationships that we are finding harder and harder to mend.”

Bo French is the former chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party who once shared a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims were a bigger threat to America. Now Atlantic writer Elaine Godfrey says French is a billionaire-backed GOP nominee who continues to post bigoted messages.

“Then there is Paxton. The three-term Texas attorney general is well known by now for facing accusations of securities fraud and bribery, for his alleged extramarital affairs, and for his less important but notable decision to pocket a $1,000 pen that did not belong to him,” reports Godfrey.

“I held my nose and voted for Trump three times, knowing that he didn’t share a lot of my moral compass,” but voting for Paxton “would be admitting to myself and my family and my friends that character truly doesn’t matter as long as your jersey is Republican,” said Huffman.

But when Godfrey pointed out to the pair that both Paxton and Trump have a “remarkably similar set of ethical problems” and asked them why “support one but draw a line at the other,” Huffman said the presidency matters more than a single Senate seat.

“There’s also part of me that understands the compromise I had to make to vote for Trump, and maybe this is my way of reclaiming a little bit of that.”

But Huffman and Shepheard said “it’s too late — that Trump and his allies ripped the door off its hinges years ago,” said Godfrey, with devastating results.

Last year, in a special election to fill a state Senate vacancy, Huffman lost a three-way fight between a self-described ‘ultra-MAGA’ candidate and a Democrat. Trump won that district by 17 points in 2024, said Godfrey, but it elected that Democrat by 14.

If Paxton tanks, Huffman said the Texas GOP might feel compelled to reform the way the party runs primaries, which could allow “more reasonable, less morally compromised candidates” to succeed in primaries.

“Ken Paxton losing may be the thing that could save the Republican Party in Texas,” she said.

Still, other Republicans are terrified at what could happen if Democrats start building inroads, no matter how deplorable the GOP’s options may be.

“We are exactly where we wanted to be 30 years ago,” said Jill Tate, a 53-year-old Republican activist and the president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women. “If we lose one statewide, the door is open. We cannot let it be open.”

President Donald Trump's dogged push to build his massive "triumphal arch" in Washington, D.C., hit a new legal roadblock, The Washington Post reports, as the disruptive project now faces a major court battle.

On Saturday, the Commonwealth of Virginia and the District of Columbia government jointly sued the Trump administration over the arch project, seeking to halt its construction. The suit argued that the arch, planned to be an enormous 250 feet fall, has been pushed forward on "flagrantly unlawful" grounds, and if completed, would forever alter the "landscape" of the U.S. capital city.

"The lawsuit is the latest attempt to stop the 250-foot-tall arch, which Trump hopes to build near Arlington National Cemetery and says will commemorate the nation’s 250th birthday," the Post's report detailed. "The administration would like to begin construction as soon as next week. The two jurisdictions are asking a federal judge to halt the plan and argue that they have 'indisputable standing' to bring their lawsuit because the towering arch would have tangible, negative effects on the region — an argument that distinguishes their lawsuit from others that have tried to stop Trump’s construction projects."

The report continued: "D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb (D) said the arch construction would cause 'serious, immediate and irreparable harm to the District and its residents,' while Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones (D) said 'Trump’s illegal vanity project' would be an affront to Arlington National Cemetery and the 'extraordinary sacrifices it represents.''"

“The Commonwealth has a solemn duty and a profound interest in preserving the dignity of this sacred place,” Jones said in a statement. “We will vigorously litigate to protect its sanctity and honor the legacy of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

As the report noted further, this suit is not the first legal battle that the arch has faced. A separate suit was filed by three Vietnam veterans and a "historic preservationist," with a federal judge on Friday indicating that they might potentially side with them and block the project.

"The administration has acknowledged that the arch will unavoidably harm local historic sites by altering views, and that it will divert traffic and create loud noise during years of planned construction, among other disruptions," the report added.

The administration has attempted to argue that the arch would also serve a "national security" function, an argument which, critics allege, Trump has become reliant on to try and force through his vanity projects. In a post to Truth Social, the president claimed that the arch could be used as a drone deployment location and a sniper's nest, as well as a storage facility for ammunition.

Polls suggest President Donald Trump’s Republican Party will lose control of at least one house of Congress, but Bloomberg reports the vengeful president will likely take electoral defeat as a “cue to step up his interventions abroad, renewing his attacks on Iran, attempting to force Ukraine to bow to Russian demands, or revisiting global tariffs.”

“He could easily accelerate his agenda,” said Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore. “Extremely angry” after the elections, “he will be looking for an opportunity to continue to show leadership in the way that he thinks is important, and so I do think that he will aggressively pursue his trade agenda.”

But Bloomberg reports there are indications that Trump’s power may already have peaked, not just at home — where voters are giving him a trouncing and neutering his rubber-stamp Congress — but also globally as a batch of recent elections have bounced his international allies pivoted the world away from global Trumpism.

“In the clearest repudiation of Trump’s influence, Brazilian voters last Sunday wrong-footed analysts and market expectations to rally behind veteran leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for an historic fourth term,” Bloomberg reports. “In doing so, they not only rebuffed right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro — the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, known as the ‘Trump of the Tropic’s — but defied Trump’s push to assert U.S. dominance over Latin America. Lula campaigned on sovereignty, asserting that Brazil was nobody’s backyard.”

Flávio Bolsonaro ended up fleeing to Florida as Brazilian authorities ramped up efforts to investigation his allegations of corruption that Bolsonaro was hoping to halt with his election victory.

“In another rejection of MAGA-aligned populism, Serbian strongman Aleksandar Vucic — whose acquaintances include Donald Trump Jr. and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner — was unceremoniously ejected last weekend by voters wearied by his long years in office,” reports Bloomberg. “In his place, they elected a student-led group that tapped into public dismay at institutional corruption.”

And during a summit in Montreal this week, the European Union and Canada did an end-run around their estranged and Trumpified American allies and committed to “deepen ties in fields from defense and security to education,” according to Bloomberg.

“It’s no secret that the Trump administration has been quite a handful to deal with,” said Dino Djalal, a former Indonesian ambassador to the US.

Djalal predicted “a rebalancing of US politics” from Democrats’ projected gains in the House or Senate, which could ease international tensions and reduce the “climate of fear” global nations operate under while dealing with Trump.

Others, meanwhile, are simply hoping the midterms will bring some “respite.” This includes South Africa, which Trump has accused of waging war against its white residents, without evidence. Trump even shut the nation of this year’s US-hosted Group of 20 meetings, despite it being a permanent member since it ended apartheid.

Wall Street Journal national security reporter Alex Ward says First Lady Melania Trump essentially stole credit for Pope Leo XIV’s hard work to broker a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

Hundreds of people from an occupied city of Oleshky, in southern Ukraine, were evacuated on Friday under a ceasefire agreement allegedly negotiated by Melania Trump, according to the White House. But Ward told “Today, Explained” co-host Sean Rameswaram that it was really the Pope who built the bones of the agreement.

“It’s possible she had a role. I’m going to personally, without too much reporting, say that it was probably more Pope Leo,” said Ward.

“Melania stole Pope Leo’s ceasefire?” asked Rameswaram.

“I think a little bit. … The Russians are very much saying, ‘look at Melania Trump, look at how important she was to all this.’ And if I’m the Russians, I would love to be saying things like that because then President Trump feels like the Russians are being very generous towards my wife and to my family, and therefore I side with them.”

“It feels very convenient that the Russians are pumping that up and that even the White House is pumping up Melania Trump’s influence,” said Ward, while adding that he did not want to fully discredit her. “I’m sure she did work on this.”

Ward added that while it’s “totally possible” that the First Lady is the driving force behind the ceasefire, he said “there’s just a lot of skepticism out there about whether Kyiv and Moscow were brought to the table and browbeaten by the First Lady.”

“Again, very possible, but both sides, being Ukraine and Russia, have an incentive to play up her role,” said Ward.

Meanwhile, Trump’s catholic approval has collapsed to 30 percent before the midterms, as Trump continues to square off against Leo and impose the White House’s will over the Hole See.

“Donald Trump won the Catholic vote in 2024 by twelve points, 55 percent to Kamala Harris’s 43 percent, reports Catholic Church correspondent Christopher Hale. And four years earlier, the same group had split almost evenly.

However, six days before the midterms, Pew now finds that only 30 percent of American Catholics approve of the job Trump is doing.

“For most of his first year back in office, the decline came gradually. Trump’s approval among Catholics fell to 42 percent by April 2025 and bounced around the low 40s through the summer and fall; by January 2026 it sat at 39 percent,” wrote Hale. “ … Since then, Trump’s Catholic approval has fallen another nine points, from 39 percent to 30. With white Catholics the slide runs steeper: 13 points, from 52 percent to 39, nearly double what he lost with them over his entire first year.”

Pew does not explain the collapse, but Hale said the slide has everything to do with another Trump-era war: his voluntary attack on Iran.