death penalty for the mentally diabled

Should Mitch McConnell be required to prove he's fit to serve?

President Donald Trump and his high-ranking officials are engaged in a simultaneous project of spreading far right ideologies worldwide — and raking in billions while doing so.

In an article by The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum on Monday, Americans learned the full extent of Trump's mixing of exporting paranoid politics and turning a profit from Brazil and the United Arab Emirates to threatening longtime democratic allies like Canada and Denmark. She added that the major industries helping Trump do this include oil and gas, rare earth minerals and cryptocurrency.

"American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more," Applebaum wrote. "Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can."

She also added that "the clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government is no different. Wrongly described as 'isolationists,' many of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the world."

Applebaum contrasted the attitude of Trump supporters with that of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who famously said during the 2008 election that his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), was a decent man with whom he happened to disagree.

"Their enemies are existential, and they are international: super-spreaders of a 'wokeness' plague, or proponents of a fictitious 'censorship-industrial complex,' or advocates of 'regulation' that will hamper American business, or self-hating promoters of “mass migration” who want to drown Western civilization in a sea of brown-faced aliens," Applebaum explained. "To maintain their power and defeat these enemies, the predators, like their Bolshevik counterparts, cannot rely on traditional diplomacy, because they don’t trust its practitioners."

She concluded, "Nor do they trust many of the leaders of the democratic states that have long shared the same political and economic values as America. Although the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to cooperate closely with allied governments, the ideologues in and out of the administration are actively seeking to replace them with people and parties who share their disdain for liberal democracy and for what were once considered, at least aspirationally, to be American values. To do so, they need to expand their global influence, manipulate elections in former partner nations, and alter the flows of money and power, especially inside other democracies. Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists."

Trump himself has raked in billions since assuming office in his second term, while his sons have netted millions using their foreign policy connections to get involved in matters like investing in tungsten mines. Earlier this month, a Gallup poll found a historically high number of Americans are upset with government corruption, writing that "Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89 [percent] of U.S. adults saying it is widespread. That figure is up 10 percentage points from last year and well above readings in the 72 [percent] to 79 [percent] range between 2010 and 2025."

The poll added, "Democrats’ perceptions of government corruption have risen the most sharply since 2024 compared with other party groups. In former President Joe Biden’s final year in office, 57 [percent] of Democrats said corruption was widespread in government; that rose to 76 [percent] in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, and reached 91 [percent] this year. The figure among political independents (90 [percent]) aligns more closely with Democrats’ than with Republicans’ (83 [percent]) and is up 12 points since 2024."

A prosecutor who worked with special counsel Robert Mueller when he investigated President Donald Trump's ties to Russia has a theory about why the president did not attend his son's wedding — namely, that he may have known it was being bankrolled by Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Speaking with Nicolle Wallace on MS NOW, lawyer Andrew Weissman responded to Wallace's question about why the same Republicans who blasted President Joe Biden's son Hunter for serving on the board of a Ukrainian company are conspicuously silent about the younger Trump's glaring conflict of interest. Weissman responded with his own opinion about why Trump refused to go to the wedding, a decision that raised eyebrows at the time.

"The father, the President of the United States, did not go to his son's wedding," Weissman began, and later added "are people looking at the connection here, which is one of the reasons he may not have gone is the optics of this — which is this group of Russians at this small wedding who paid for it — and he was not going to be a part of it given what a huge team of people I worked with in the Russia investigation looked at and his insistence on calling it a hoax."

In August Weissman argued that, despite Trump's attempts to dodge legal accountability, he will not be able to avoid facing corruption charges after he leaves the White House.

“The one thing I strongly suspect, if we get back to a normal rule of law administration, I think we’re going to learn about corruption,” Weissman said at the time. “We’re going to learn that it is off the charts, particularly regarding financial crime, and it’s going to be eye-popping.”

Financial prosecutions, Weissman added, have a very long shelf-life.

“That is the kind of thing that can be prosecuted, and it is not covered by immunity,” Weissmann explained to Washington Roundtable host Jane Mayer. “… The statute of limitations, which is the time period by which you’ve brought a case, will not have run on those things. This means it won’t be too late to prosecute. So, if Donald Trump is out of office in a couple of years and you have a normal administration, even at the shortest range it’s a five-year statute of limitations, which means you have five years to bring a case.”

Additionally, one can reset the timer on that deadline, telling Mayer that “I’m saying given the shortest amount of time is five years, but it could be much longer in effect.”

A right-wing influencer posted video of the Washington D.C. home of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) being surrounded by police while the former Senate Majority Leader continues to be a No Show in the Senate.

"Now: Capitol Police encircle Mitch McConnell’s house while he’s still nowhere to be found despite the senate convening over an hour ago," conservative journalist Nick Sortor posted on x on Monday. "The fact our senators have so much contempt for us that we’re not even allowed to know if they’re alive is insane. 95 days since he’s been seen."

McConnell's absence, which began when he was hospitalized in June, has been controversial as it has held up Senate business and left Kentucky with only one effective legislator in the top lawmaking chamber. Additionally, a recent report revealed that McConnell and his staff continued to earn substantial salaries despite McConnell doing no work during that period and remaining enigmatic about his health.

"McConnell, the former Senate majority leader who earns an annual salary of $174,000, made $43,500 in taxpayer-funded paychecks during his 92-day absence from the halls of Congress," The Daily Beast wrote on Monday. "The 84-year-old senator was taken to the hospital from his Washington D.C. home on June 14 and has not been seen in public since." What's more, his staff has also been raking it in during his time away. According to the Beast, "The Kentucky senator’s six highest-paid staffers earned a combined $318,688 pre-tax in the past 92 days that he has been missing from Capitol Hill. His Senate office is led by his camera-shy chief of staff, Terry Carmack, who earns $226,000 annually. The senator’s communications director, Stephanie Penn, earns about $214,000 per year, as she has presided over this PR disaster. When accounting for the rest of McConnell’s office, which has about 40 staffers including low-level employees, the Daily Beast calculated that his entire staff received around $893,872 pre-tax in the last 92 days that their boss has been missing."

CNN has elaborated on McConnell's history of health issues.

"McConnell, a childhood polio survivor, has faced a series of health issues in recent years, including multiple falls," CNN reported on Sunday. "In 2023, he froze mid-sentence during a news conference on Capitol Hill ... Along with his own statement, McConnell included a note from the attending physician of Congress, who described the injuries after the fall at his Washington, DC, home as 'minor.' The physician added that 'McConnell has experienced several falls throughout the year that have been attributed to his post-polio condition.'"

The New York Times reported Monday that federal agents may have broken state laws when the Department of Homeland Security ordered them to use private information to access voter records in state databases.

President Donald Trump's effort to find noncitizens on state voter rolls may be relying on questionable data, rushed reviews and even investigative practices that could have violated local state law.

The “Unlawful Voter Initiative” is a Trump administration operation that has reportedly deployed hundreds of federal agents to search voter-registration records for evidence that noncitizens are voting in mass numbers. It was exposed in a New York Times report last month, in which the whistleblower alleged that hundreds of federal agents have been ordered to sift through voter rolls in a widespread hunt to find voter fraud.

“This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (R-N.Y.) said in an interview.

“We’ve never seen anything quite like this. They come up with so many different ways to try and steal the election, to try and jaundice the election, but we’ve never seen anything quite like this. Department of Homeland Security is actually pulling away these law officers, these federal law enforcement officers, away from the work they’re supposed to do," he added.

Democratic senators sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding that the operation be stopped while they seek answers. The whistleblower said that agents are required to complete at least 40 reviews in eight hours, giving them little time to search each voter's citizenship and voting history.

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor sounded the alarm Monday in a column, saying that the software used to control a national voter database hands any hacker the key to flip a switch and nullify voters' eligibility to cast a ballot and have it counted.

One of the pieces of information revealed by the whistleblower is that the federal agents are looking through personally identifiable information that comes from both internal government information as well as external sources, including things like birth dates and even partial Social Security numbers while they're searching through records.

The whistleblower questioned whether it's legal.

"The agents plugged those names and personal data into public-facing state websites to find a subject’s voter history," the report said. "Some states, such as Virginia, declare explicitly that only individual voters may use the search tool to look up their own records. Others, such as California, require specific information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number in an effort to limit the use of the tool to individuals."

It's one of the reasons that the whistleblower said that they flagged it for those leading the investigation within Homeland Security's Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. They were told that agents could use the database for operations in the voter search initiative. "Yet leadership appeared to acknowledge the potential for legal liability..." the report said.

The leadership told the whistleblower that agents “are not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented.”

“This statement suggests that there may be legal implications for accessing these websites,” said a report produced by the government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund. They have been working with the whistleblower and providing them with legal representation. “Yet they are still requiring officers to engage in this illegal activity with promises of personal liability protection.”