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President Donald Trump has already built a reputation for defying court orders, but now Politico reports his top Homeland Security commander, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, repeatedly confirmed to senators on Tuesday that he, too, is loath to accept court decisions that he does not like.

“If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” Mullin said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the panel that funds DHS, pointed out to Mullin that even Republican-appointed judges have accused the department of violating almost 100 court orders this year. Murphy added that the Trump administration’s noncompliance as the main factor fueling the ongoing partisan feud over DHS funding that led to the longest funding lapse in U.S. history this year.

“This is a really important discussion for us to have, because this is — whether you want to believe it or not — at the root of our disagreement,” Murphy told him, adding, “it is very hard for us to figure out how to fund an agency that is violating the law.”

Somehow, Mullin, a former Oklahoma Republican senator, argued that DHS “will never break the Constitution, and we’re not going to break the law,” despite claiming they will not follow court orders they don’t like.

Court judges have recently handed Trump a flurry of losses. A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order against the National Park Service, ordering it to not interfere with a group that had been flying an “8647” flag in Washington, D.C. Common restaurant slang for “eighty-six” goes back nearly a century, the judge noted, saying that it meant “to throw out” or “to get rid of.” He made no reference to Trump’s politicized DOJ lobbing investigations and indictments against Trump perceived enemy former FBI head James Comey for posting pictures of the same numbers with seashells on a beach.

Anther federal judge recently dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit seeking access to Arizona’s detailed voter registration records, dealing another blow to the Trump administration’s national effort to obtain expansive voter data. And still another judge recently ordered that Trump to remove his name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and that he could not close it for what the Trump administration said were two years of renovations.

“[If] you look at the big constitutional suits against this administration — big separation-of-powers issues, big violations of law. There are hundreds of those cases, I think north of 700 in the courts, and the administration has been losing those 2-to-1 in the lower courts,” said Trump’s ex-security expert Miles Taylor on MS NOW.

Former Republican speechwriter Tim Miller told MS NOW that there is a reason President Donald Trump keeps delegating so many jobs to so few lackeys. He says it’s all comes down to math.

Trump recently appointed Bill Pulte to oversee the entire national security apparatus of the United States. He will serve in the job while also remaining in his current job as Federal Housing Finance Agency Director. This will add to Pulte's other job as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But Miller said there’s a reason Trump keeps nominating lackeys and yes-men to multiple positions.

“I think there is something interesting about the fact that he's going to have three jobs and … their ability to investigate enemies and go after enemies is limitless,” said Miller — adding, however, that his work “might be limited by having the horses to do so.”

“And, like, the fact that they can't find enough stooges to do all these jobs is the tiniest silver lining here, said Miller. “I expect that we'll start to hear more leaks out of DNI, and that there's some remaining people that are legitimate public service folks that's still work there. And so, you know, I'm a slightly skeptical about his ability to execute on all of this.”

But on the other side of that coin, warned Miller, the fact that Trump is spreading his stooges so thin means there is nobody competent working any particular problem at any particular time.

“Part of the reason that he can do the three jobs is that, again, like he's not gonna do the job of director of national intelligence — like he is only put in there to do the muckraking, to go after the political foes. Like that's why he's there. And I think that there's some areas of about that in particular that are pretty concerning.”

Do not expect, for example, National intelligence to astutely uncover plots to attack the U.S. homeland with any kind of deft. Miller says instead Pulte will be digging up research to sic DOJ prosecutors on Trump’s enemies, as he likely did with the DOJ’s failed investigation of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and Federal Reserve board of governors member Lisa Cook on shaky mortgage charges.

“I might not be an intelligence expert … but I'm a little bit of a MAGA-ologist. And I just think back to the 2020 election fraud stuff and think about all the fake allegations of foreign interference. There were Italian satellites, the claims of Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelans had gotten inside the Dominion voting machines. There were all the Chinese bamboo ballots in Arizona. They had all these accusations that there was foreign interference on behalf of the democrats that were all false. This falls in [Pulte’s] remit no,” said Miller. “Now, you have Kash Patel and Pulte, who can either chase down these fake investigations, fabricate them, and do what they did on the mortgage documents, come up with small pieces of evidence that Democrats or election officials were communicating with overseas people in ways that might have been totally appropriate. I think that is like the real plan.”

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President Donald Trump has earned a vicious new moniker: “commander in thief,” writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who chastised the president for his efforts to engage in a “brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies.” Those allies, he said, could include Trump’s supporters who were present at the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — whom Friedman labels “phony defenders of freedom’s frontier.”

Friedman also accused Trump of having “conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a $1.776 billion political slush fund.”

Having a president who “behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is costing us dearly at home and abroad,” he writes. “This perversion of the American presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s future.”

Friedman argued those are just a few of several reasons why Trump has failed as commander in chief.

Trump has not even tried to get Democrats to support his war against Iran.

"Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united,” says Friedman. “Because there is nothing more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home.” And he warns that “seeing America at war with itself” just encourages the enemy.

Friedman also expressed alarm at how Trump’s actions toward America’s allies have forced them to engage in deterrence — not just against Russia, but against America.

“Our allies have watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark,” writes Friedman. “They have watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. They have watched him slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, put the Russian aggressor on the same moral footing as that country and then top it all off with reckless, ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.”

Friedman also pointed to the early days of Trump’s second term, when the president “forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying to overrun it. This is the real ‘Trump Doctrine’: Oppose America, and I will tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.”

A prominent conservative commentator recently argued that Democrats and Republicans are both applying a double-standard regarding seemingly disqualifying scandals for their Senate candidates in key races.

“Maine Democratic Senate primary candidate Graham Platner and Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton are different candidates dealing with different scandals,” wrote The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone on Tuesday. “Paxton’s infidelity is not the same as Platner’s, nor is Paxton’s pattern of corruption and other moral shortcomings the same as Platner’s Nazi tattoo and history of racist comments online. I am not equating their wrongdoings, nor do I propose doing so.”

Perticone is referring to the reports that Platner — an oyster farmer — had extramarital affairs, supported homophobic and sexist comments online and has a Nazi tattoo on his chest. Paxton has also had multiple extramarital affairs, fired whistleblowers, is accused of multiple financial crimes and participated in Trump’s coup attempt after the president lost the 2020 election. In 2023 he was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives on abuse of office and bribery charges, although the Texas Senate later acquitted him. Both Platner and Paxton are now considered by polling experts to be potential political liabilities to each of their parties’ chances of controlling the Senate after the 2026 midterm elections.

“I asked some senators from both parties, many of whom either jettisoned all principles after coming to Washington or came to power in the first place simply by not having any, whether Americans should demand more of their elected officials on the character front,” Perticone wrote. “Yes, they all seemed to agree: Americans should hold politicians from the other party to a higher standard.” He then cited comments supporting Paxton from Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, John Kennedy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas as well as Democrats backing Platner including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (technically an independent) and Andy Kim of New Jersey (whose response to Platner was wishy-washy).

“Selective moralizing has been around in politics as long as the profession has been practiced. The prominent Republicans who admonished Bill Clinton for his peccadilloes in the 1990s were hardly men of high character themselves,” Perticone continued. “White evangelicals grew more supportive of Donald Trump the more his traditionally sinful behavior came to light. Many Democrats who admonished Trump for his character are now biting their tongue about Platner. That’s the way this stuff goes.”

While ha acknowledged understanding why partisans on both sides might support Platner or Paxton despite these scandals, simply because they don’t want their party to lose, he warned there is a practical as well as moral consequence to this attitude.

“Candidates like this are still a massive risk, and not just because we don’t know what is yet to come out about either,” Perticone wrote. “Just consider the recent spate of expulsions, resignations, and absences in this Congress alone. Very thin majorities are often just one scandal away from stopping regular business for an entire chamber.”

President Donald Trump has done a number of things that suggest he plans on stealing the 2026 midterm elections. According to experts who spoke with AlterNet. If voters do not act now to stop him, he could conceivably succeed in doing so.

There are many factors suggesting Trump will try to steal the midterms. In addition to attempting a coup after his loss to then-Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, he has imposed restrictions on mail-in voting, insinuated that he would deploy ICE and radical groups to polling locations, suggested he will purge voters from the rolls using DOGE and state-shared voter files, pushed for voter ID laws and employed partisan gerrymandering all over America. When asked how he plans to win the midterms despite his historically low approval ratings (stuck in the 30s), he has repeatedly professed indifference as to what voters think of him.

A representative from the Democracy Defenders Fund — a nonprofit organization staffed by a bipartisan group of lawyers, politicians, activists and other experts concerned about Trump’s anti-democracy measures — elaborated on how each of these variables when combined pose a serious threat to the democratic integrity of the midterms.

“I think there are two things to consider,” Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund who specializes in voting rights as well as election law litigation and advocacy, told AlterNet. “One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is ... the chilling effect on voters.”

Chaudhuri added, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I'm just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they're US citizens, but they might decide, "I'm not going to vote." So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.” In addition to that intimidating factor, Chaudhuri argued the gerrymandering and FBI seizure of Fulton County, GA also could keep voters away from the polls.

“We're going to see consequences in terms of voters saying, ‘I don't want the FBI to get my personal ballot in the future,’” Chaudhuri argued. “So, to sum up, I do agree that putting it all together, it does paint an ominous picture.”

Dan Vicuña amplified Chaudhuri’s observations. He is Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, a nonprofit good government group with a distinguished pedigree tracing back to 1970.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He concluded, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

Not only are these efforts anti-democratic; some of them may be illegal.

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña explained. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”

Susannah Goodman, Common Cause’s Policy Director in the Voting and Fair Representation Program, offered other examples of Trump’s potentially illegal behavior.

“The other thing is that, as you well know, the administration has been trying to compel states to turn their voter rolls over to the federal government and to consolidate all of that in a mega database,” Goodman said. “A number of states have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls with personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, et cetera. Common Cause and our partners have intervened in, I think, 17 of those cases on behalf of voters.”

She added, “I don't believe there has been a single case, Dan — correct me if I'm wrong — where, when the state has resisted and claimed they are not going to turn these voter rolls over, the court has dismissed the case or compelled the states to turn them over. The government has not had a compelling reason, and the states have won. So when states fight back, they win. We have been involved in that litigation. That is another huge power grab by the administration. It is also an illegal power grab, and when we have pushed back, we have won.”

Some illegal power grabs, though, may not be caught until it’s too late. Chaudhuri pointed out that “even without the amount of chaos we're seeing for this election, we've seen it in past elections when well-meaning states might start scrubbing their voter rolls closer to the election and voters start getting notices — for example, ‘You have a felony, you have to come and verify at the elections office.’ Many voters don't get these notices and then can't comply with the timeframes under state law. So if we've seen it in the past in a different context, we're definitely going to see it here, because this is a much larger-scale assault on our voting system.”

The risk of being purged from the voting rolls without knowing about it is amplified by the possibility that Trump may do this intentionally.

“The administration's demand that every state turn over its voter rolls has culminated in the most recent executive order Trump issued, where one of the buckets orders two executive branch agencies to compile these massive databases called the state citizenship lists,” Chaudhuri explained. “Under the terms of the executive order, those lists have to be made available to the states 60 days before the election. We've seen states like Texas and Missouri use federal government lists — they've used the SAVE database — in order to verify whether people are citizens, and have wrongly purged and wrongly targeted people who are US citizens. The administration now creating these massive lists before every federal election is going to create not just massive chaos, but also, again, a chilling effect on voters.”

When asked if people could simply show up on Election Day thinking that they're registered to vote only to find out that they are not, Chaudhuri described this as “a very realistic concern.”

“I used to staff the Election Protection Coalition when I worked as a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers' Committee, and we actually saw voters going to the polls and being told by the poll worker, ‘You're not registered to vote,’ or ‘You're not in the poll book,’” Chaudhuri said. “And it's too late by the time you find out on Election Day to register to vote in many states. Here, a voter may very well be purged and find out too late — and then they will be disenfranchised. The one thing we would encourage voters to do is to vote early. And if they're voting by mail, to again vote early and not wait close to Election Day to get in their ballots.”

While voters may feel helpless in light of these threats, there are things they can do. If they want to confirm they have not been illegally scrubbed from the voting rolls, they can vote early and contact their local election authorities. Additionally Goodman explained that there are ways for ordinary people to stop what Trump is doing on an organized rather than personal level — but they need to act now.

“The first is that the voting rights community is fighting all of these attacks,” Goodman said. “So while it seems overwhelming when you read about them and, as you said, put it all together — and the through-line is that he wants to alter the outcome of the election — Common Cause, the ACLU, Lawyers' Committee, Campaign Legal Center, all of our groups are working together in a coordinated way to address all of these assaults on many different levels: legislatively, with litigation, with grassroots organizing, meeting people at the kitchen table. There is an assault, but it is being answered in the states.”

She added, “And the second thing is we have faith in voters — that voters will turn out and they will cast their ballots. Our election protection outreach is really designed not to intimidate voters, not to tell them that it's game over, but to tell them that the reason these attacks are happening is because their voice is very powerful and they need to make a plan to vote. They need to vote early if possible, and stay engaged.”

Vicuña added that voters similarly succeeded in stopping Trump’s anti-voter legislation, the SAVE Act. Yet even if voters are able to entirely thwart Trump’s attempts to steal the midterms, there still may be lingering damage.

“The only thing I'd add is that even when these efforts to subvert the election fail, they run a risk of sowing confusion,” Vicuña opined. “That's why we're involved with a lot of nonpartisan organizations and election protection efforts across the country — to combat misinformation and give voters the right information they need to know what their local rules are. Trump is a chaos agent trying to sow confusion, and we're going to push back in that way as well.”

Chaudhuri encouraged people to pay attention to these issues and not feel discouraged, despite “media fatigue” covering Trump’s scandals.

“There is so much going on, and that might be number six of your five — we're being bombarded by new things happening all the time every day,” Chaudhuri said. “The news is dominated by five new things that nobody even thought of. And so that's a tactic as well — to desensitize the public and the average voter, and shift the focus away from what matters, which is voters being informed of what could go wrong and having the tools to know what they can do in order to cast their ballot and have that ballot count.”

Former GOP congressman and MAGA lawmaker Joe Walsh said it wasn’t Republicans’ bravery that sank President Donald Trump’s $1.8 slush fund. It was the infuriated voters filling up their inboxes with threats and outrage.

“Donald Trump's corrupt, illegal, horrible, $1.8 billion taxpayer funded slush fund to go after his political opponents and reward his political friends is dead,” said Walsh. “Trump administration appears to be backing off of its $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund after rare GOP backlash. The slush fund is dead.”

Walsh said this was a refreshing change to many American voters, who feel nothing but angst as Trump and his administration tramples the rule of law with the help of Republican operatives in Congress and the court system.

“See, it's been so easy these past 17-18 months to feel helpless every f—— day, because we don't have a Congress. This guy Trump can do whatever he wants because we don't have a legislative branch,” said Walsh on his Tuesday podcast. “We haven't for 18 months.”

“And it seems like the courts, man — especially the Supreme Court — they’re in on it too. And [other] courts are struggling to keep up, and every day Trump's doing bad stuff and saying bad stuff, and it can feel really overwhelming and helpless.”

But enough, apparently, was enough with even the most helpless voter, said Walsh. Trump’s slush fund was just too obvious, too blatantly crooked, and serving all the wrong people.

“The slush fund is dead because of you,” said Walsh, “because the American people, upon learning about it two weeks ago, got f—— outraged and used that outrage constructively and bombarded their [congressional] members of and spread the word, shared it with everybody they knew and know on social media and elsewhere. And a huge backlash ensued.”

Walsh called Republican members of Congress are cowards, and he said they didn’t finally discover their spines or a sense of bravery when Trump proposed a plan to create a taxpayer-funded reservoir with which to buy his friends and supporters. The way Walsh describes it, they just found something new to be afraid of: their own constituents.

“Republicans in DC have let Trump know they cannot support [his slush fund]. Now, where do you think that comes from? That newfound courage, and it's not courage — don't ever put the word ‘courage’ with Republicans ever again. … Where do you think that came from? That came from the American people. Republicans found out. Republicans paid attention,” said Walsh. “Republicans realized overwhelmingly this is a really bad thing because the American people are outraged about it and they opposed it.”

“You did it. That's all. I wanted to start with that. Good News Tuesday. You do make a difference. Not always we don't, but you do make a difference,” said Walsh.

President Donald Trump’s policy in trying to contain Ebola may get Americans killed, a former Secretary of State warned on Tuesday.

“As secretary of state, one of us saw firsthand how indispensable the U.S. was in arresting the epidemic,” former Secretary of State John Kerry wrote with his daughter, public health expert Dr. Vanessa Kerry, in a Wall Street Journal editorial. He had described how the Ebola virus had spread through West Africa in September 2014 and risked becoming a global pandemic. The dangerous pathogen is highly lethal, with an average case fatality rate of 50 percent. The common symptoms include fatigue and weakness, fever, sore throat, muscle and joint pain, severe headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and internal hemorrhaging.

“As a physician and global health leader, the other has spent years helping countries strengthen the systems that stop outbreaks,” the two Kerrys added. “Today, another Ebola outbreak is unfolding in Central Africa. Absent a more competent response than we have seen, the outcome could be tragic.”

They added that the World Health Organization (WHO) has already declared a recent Ebola outbreak in the Congo as a “public health emergency of international concern,” with more than 1,000 suspected cases already on the record. Because the disease has since spread into Uganda, and is present in areas marked by poverty, armed conflict and displacement, authorities have struggled to contain it through contact tracing.

“In response to the 2014 epidemic, the U.S. led a historic international public-health mobilization,” the Kerrys wrote. “President Obama treated Ebola as a humanitarian emergency and a national-security priority. The strategy wasn’t simply to keep Ebola out of the U.S. but to stop transmission at the source.”

They added, “More than 3,500 U.S. personnel were deployed across West Africa. Dozens of ministerial-level entreaties by the State Department helped deliver contributions of medical personnel from the U.K. and allies across Europe. The U.S. put boots on the ground to build treatment centers and labs, train thousands of health workers, and support safe burial teams. Congress approved $5.4 billion in emergency funding. Coordinators at the State Department ensured that the Defense Department, Health and Human Services Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, CDC and international partners all worked together. Approximately 28,600 people were infected and more than 11,000 died, but hundreds of thousands of lives were spared because the U.S. and the international community acted decisively.”

By contrast, Trump’s implementation of Project 2025 has weakened the same systems that protected Americans from Ebola at the time.

“The dismantling of USAID; cuts to U.S. foreign assistance, vaccine initiatives, global health funding; and America’s withdrawal from the WHO have left major gaps in international disease surveillance and response,” the Kerrys wrote. In addition to Trump, the world’s richest man Elon Musk and vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were key to implementing some of those initiatives. Instead of using the past successful containment programs, Trump is instead implementing measures the Kerrys perceive as inadequate.

After elaborating on the numerous services that America used to provide and now cannot do, they concluded, “The administration still has time to change course and mobilize America’s scientific expertise, public-health capabilities and diplomatic leadership. The costs of waiting, in dollars and lives, are vastly greater than the costs of acting now.”

The Kerrys are not alone in criticizing Trump’s Ebola response. Speaking to AlterNet earlier this month, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts also said that the president’s inadequate measures are putting Americans at risk.

“Travel bans are generally not effective for the control of infectious diseases,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told AlterNet. “For instance, the Omicron variant was first discovered for COVID-19 in South Africa on November 26, 2021 and was here in San Francisco two days later because air travel is so frequent and SARS-CoV-2 can spread when asymptomatic.”

President Donald Trump’s former White House communications director just explained how the Republican he once served is instead a literal fascist.

“There are 12 chapters in Laurence Rees’s book ... people should know,” Anthony Scaramucci explained in a Tuesday X post. “Spreading conspiracy theories, using us versus them, leading as a hero, corrupting youth, conniving with the elite, attacking human rights, exploiting faith, valuing enemies, eliminating resistance, escalating racism, killing at a distance, stoking fear.”

Explaining that he is not using the term “fascism” hyperbolically, Scaramucci said that he is instead “grounding it in a historical analysis of what leaders do when they want to be authoritarian.” From there, he pivoted to Trump’s attempts — sometimes successful, sometimes not — to put his name and/or face seemingly everywhere in American life, from the Kennedy Center, the US Institute of Peace, savings and investment accounts, his plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, his visa program, national park passes, various airports, battleships, Washington DC panners, a US dollar coin, a proposed $250 bill and inside US passports.

“We didn’t even get to the naming,” Scaramucci said. “He wants his name on the US dollar, inside the passport, and his face on everything the American people touch when they interact with their own government.

He concluded, “Washington wouldn’t have done that. Eisenhower wouldn’t have done that. Reagan wouldn’t. Obama certainly didn’t.”

Scaramucci has emerged as one of the most outspoken former Trump officials who criticizes his former boss. Earlier this month, Scaramucci compared Trump supporters who still back the president to dogs.

“Trump’s approach to corruption is to do everything in the open,” Scaramucci explained on X. “Make it so ridiculous and so inundating that people’s heads spin and then once they’re numb, keep going.”

He added that Trump has successfully buried his ties to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, even though he has failed to comply with congressional requirements for full disclosure, redacted his name from the files and allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl after Epstein facilitated the asserted crime.

“Yet, Trump masterfully buried the lead on all of it — through a war, through noise, through sheer volume of chaos,” Scaramucci explained. “When you ask voters what they care about, the Epstein files are at the bottom of the list. They want jobs and gas prices they can afford. Trump’s corruption isn’t even on their radar screen.”

He then added that people who oppose Trump should “not underestimate him. He’s sitting at 34 percent approval and he still has 9/10 self-identified Republicans doing whatever he says. He says 'bark'. They say 'woof'. He says 'jump'. How high, sir?”

Scaramucci concluded, “That’s the architecture of power he’s built and it’s more durable than his critics want to admit.”

Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, Scaramucci expressed some sympathy for Trump supporters, arguing that much of the movement is fueled by economic grievances.

“What I saw was in a generation we went from aspirational working class families, like the one I grew up in, to [desperate] working class families,” Scaramucci claimed. “What I saw is a decline in wages causing some level of economic asphyxiation for a very large group of people. And so Trump being out there, going into those areas, explaining the policies that he’s going to put in place, and then executing on some of those policies. I mean it’s not me saying, it’s just go look at ‘The Wall Street Journal.’”

The affordability crisis isn't merely a "vibes" problem; a new report shows that Americans are losing hope.

The New Republic's Monica Potts cited it as the "vibecession," which some argue never really went away.

Economists have spent years explaining that Americans are feeling the impact of a struggling economy that never fully recovered from the pandemic. Experts have tried to cite consumer sentiment and confidence in the economy.

A new report from The Roosevelt Institute released Tuesday indicates that the issue has gone beyond "affordability." People don't feel like they can achieve a "good life" in the U.S. anymore.

“If we are talking about the core goals of economic policy, yes, we want overall growth, but to what end?” said the institute's president and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins. “To deliver the building blocks of a good life for people, right? We fundamentally believe that progress should be about people living better lives. So, what does it look like to actually deliver that for people?”

While many polling firms ask blanket questions about whether someone is "better off" or whether the economy is their top issue in this election, the Roosevelt survey specifically asks about people's financial situation. It found that voters feel they have to make "trade offs" to afford what they need and that they don't have enough to buy what they need, much less a financial cushion.

"Just one in five said they were very secure in their income and confident they’d be able to retire comfortably," the report said. "Almost 80 percent said they are worried about their finances now or in the future, and 35 percent have stopped putting money into savings in order to make ends meet."

There are two previously cited trends: that there is "no slack" in the economy and that Americans don't feel any financial security. In two-earner households, the top two breadwinners are already working as much as they can. Those working multiple jobs are on the rise. It comes as costs continue to rise, particularly when it comes to the base prices of utilities, housing and healthcare.

Economists have described the U.S. as being in a K-shaped economy, meaning those at the very top continue to do better and better, while everyone else sinks. It's something that has been growing since the early 2000s. Americans largely blame self-serving politicians "working for billionaires." It has sent confidence in the government underwater by 41 points.

“People’s expectations are shaped by what’s possible in a world where people can buy their third yacht, and you don’t have the time to spend with your child because of the number of jobs that you have to work, even if those jobs mean that you can buy groceries for the week,” Wilkins told TNR.

“We ought to be able to do better by people than the basics when so much is possible based on the resources that we have," she continued. "So, to my mind, what we are seeing is people extremely frustrated by real measures of economic insecurity in a world where they can tell, based on the wealth and power around them, that things could be different if we could change them to be so.”

It isn't a new sentiment. She cited movements like "Occupy Wall Street" and the "Tea Party" as part of the fight against economic woes.

" The blatantly corrupt Trump administration and its coterie of billionaires have simply raised the pitch," wrote reporter Monica Potts.

Still, while Americans may not trust the government, they still want it to act. There remains enormous support for government-funded health care, child care and public colleges, the survey showed.