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President Donald Trump sees the stock market as a referendum on his performance, and by many accounts the numbers are high. But don’t fool yourself into thinking the market is sailing on a wave of glory. This thing is “lousy for most,” says Bloomberg Analyst Jonathan Levin.

The market is largely getting buoyed by one industry — and most Americans are not making money on it. Worse, they have plenty to lose if it all goes south.

“Although the S&P 500 Index closed at an all-time high this week, it did so on the strength of a handful of companies focused on the booming artificial intelligence sector, papering over signs of growing vulnerabilities in the economy and financial markets,” wrote Levin on Friday. “With the midterm elections less than a month away, what Trump sees as an asset for Republicans may in fact be a liability.

The economy, he warned, is actually “reeling from inflation that remains stubbornly high and unchecked fiscal budget deficits” while average hourly earnings adjusted for inflation have been losing ground for five months.

“A Federal Reserve Bank of New York report this week showed Americans expect their earnings growth to lag even further behind consumer inflation in the next 12 months, due in part to the surge in gasoline and diesel prices caused by the US-Israel war with Iran,” Levin explained. “That’s in addition to efforts underway by the White House to find workarounds to reinstate the inflationary tariffs deemed illegal by the Supreme Court.”

With inflation devouring meager pay raises, Levin said it’s not a surprise that Americans are spending less, which is putting a hit on the stocks of companies in the “consumer, travel, transportation, real estate and financial sectors.”

But the purported strength of the AI sector, Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. and chipmaker Nvidia Corp. are overshadowing the poor performance infecting much of the stock market.

These few the outperformers could potentially sustain their momentum — at least for a while, said Levin, and the rest of the slumping market could catch up, but Levin cites billionaire Michael Novogratz saying on Wednesday that AI is the “biggest bubble of our lifetime.”

And what do bubbles inevitably do? Bridgewater hedge fund founder Ray Dalio said this week that AI is a “classic bubble” that is nearing a bursting point thanks to rising interest rates and the need to turn wealth into cash.

“It’s impossible to know when exactly a bubble will burst, but what is certain is that the market will crumble, and probably spectacularly, if investor sentiment turns against AI,” said Levin. But the losers won’t just be people making concentrated bets on AI stocks. It will also be the 401k investors and everyday Americans who suffered after the housing crash concluded the Bush years.

“As of 2025, around $23 trillion in assets were indexed or benchmarked to the S&P,” said Levin. “Also leveraged to the index’s fragile value is wealth-driven consumption and, ultimately, millions of jobs.”

A prominent group of conservative Christians are denouncing President Donald Trump's top military official, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for ordering that convicted terrorist and mass murder Nidal Malik Hasan — who committed the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that led to 13 deaths and 32 injuries — be executed publicly by firing squad. It is the first public execution in modern American history.

"The National Association of Evangelicals (along with several other religious groups) are now joining the USCCB in condemning Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth’s plans to publicly execute Nidal Malik Hasan, also saying doing so promotes a 'culture of death,'" reported journalist Jack Jenkins of the religious news outlet RNS on Friday.

In an excerpt from his report, Jenkins wrote that "Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told RNS that while he affirms the 'need for justice' regarding Hasan’s crime, 'at the same time, a live-streamed execution by firing squad risks turning one of the state’s most solemn responsibilities into a public spectacle, promoting a culture of death, rather than a culture that upholds the dignity of every human being.'"

Evangelical Christian organizations are not alone in slamming Trump and Hegseth for choosing to publicly execute Hasan. On the social media platform X, prominent commentators from all sides of the political spectrum expressed disgust with the decision.

Billy Binion, reporter for the libertarian magazine Reason Magazine, posted, “This is sick. You can support justice for Nidal Hasan’s victims without making his execution a source of entertainment. This administration so often governs for the online mob. It’s depraved.”

Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Intercept and ideologically heterodox, argued, “There are a very small number of countries that still carry out public executions. Those are the countries we are constantly told are uniquely primitive, barbaric, sick and evil. It’s revealing that Pete Hegseth wants the US to join that group but also entirely unsurprising.”

Wajahat Ali of the liberal Substack The Left Hook stated, “Public lynchings will be next.”

Trump and Hegseth are also under fire for terminating the employment of dozens of top staff at the Pentagon, amounting to more than 900 years of combined experience, and replacing them with partisan loyalists.

"Since January 2025," Michael N. Schmitt, a law professor at New York University, wrote for Just Security in June, "the Defense Department has removed, replaced, or forced the early retirement of a remarkable concentration of operationally experienced senior officers. Among them are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Army, and the commander of U.S. Cyber Command, who concurrently serves as director of the National Security Agency. Most recently, Gen. Christopher Donahue, one of the most decorated and combat-experienced officers of his generation, has been forced out as commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and, in his NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) role, as commander of Allied Land Command. Public explanations have been sparse and, to the extent they have been offered, largely general."

Schmitt added, "The question regarding these departures is not whether the president and secretary of defense have broad lawful authority to reshape the senior officer corps. They unequivocally do. Nor is it a question of whether personnel decisions of this kind are ever warranted. Sometimes, they certainly are. Instead, at its core, a central question is their impact on the combat effectiveness, indeed the lethality, of our armed forces."

Even Gen. Christopher LaNeve, Hegseth’s senior military aide, indirectly admitted the mass firings could become a problem.

“Every shortcut in training and lapse in discipline will be paid for in blood,” LaNeve wrote.

A former Republican lawmaker is slamming Republicans’ hypocrisy as President Donald Trump eases a Russian oil embargo to diminish a Republican midterm bloodbath.

Trump said Friday that Russia will supply more than 4 million tons of diesel to the global market under a deal he struck with President Vladimir Putin during a phone call.

“I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter,” Trump said on Truth Social.

He then dropped an unproven claim of having “TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz,” and between that and the agreement, “Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!”

The Treasury Department temporarily waived sanctions on Russian diesel through April 2027 under a general license issued Friday. However, former Republican lawmaker Adam Kinzinger was quick to slap Congressional Republicans with their hypocrisy at the announcement with an old anti-Biden post from 2022.

“Hey look what i found!” wrote Kinzinger on X, while sharing a March 2022 post by the House Judiciary GOP to “Stop buying Russian oil, @JoeBiden.”

Social media hecklers immediately pounced the duplicity

“There's always a tweet, always,” posted one critic on X.

“GOP remain the biggest turn coats ever!” hollered another.

Still another critic posted a 2014 tweet from Trump, complaining about China signing a “massive” oil and gas deal with Russia, which Trump claimed gave “Russia plenty of ammo to continue laughing in U.S. face.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy immediately condemned Trump’s diesel deal with Putin, with Zelenskyy warning that easing sanctions without a commitment from Russia to de-escalate will only prolong the war.

“Gifts to Putin will not bring peace or any benefit to the civilized world,” Zelenskyy said in a social media post. “Russia will ‘repay’ the diesel with further terror and perfidy. Allowing Russia to sell petroleum products is an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged.”

But Trump is desperate to lower the high diesel prices that are destroying Republicans in the final weeks of this year’s midterms—prices aggravated by his voluntary war on Iran.

Earlier this week, Trump issued an executive order that allows truckers to use tax-exempt offroad diesel on highways without paying federal penalties. But critics say the EO is largely a toothless ploy because it only defers the tax obligation and creates confusion about whether truckers will have to pay up later. Additionally, the EO does not reduce the patchwork quilt of diesel tax fees truckers will find while driving across multiple states.

A conservative commentator for CNN who has long been reported "thirsty" for a job working for Washington Republicans just got publicly insulted for not being picked as President Donald Trump's new press secretary.

"Sorry you lost your race too, @ScottJenningsKY," Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for United States Senate in her state earlier this year, posted on X on Friday.

Instead the White House chose Katherine Zacharia, who was described by Reuters as "a communications adviser for President Donald Trump's Truth Social platform. Her selection was characterized as one that "would put Zacharia at the center of the White ⁠House's public messaging operation in the final stretch before the elections, when Trump's agenda and his party's control of Congress will be put before voters. Trump's approval rating fell to 32 percent — the lowest of his political career — as his fellow Republicans soured on his handling of the cost of living and the Iran war, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found."

Reuters added, "The selection of Zacharia underscores the close ties between Trump's administration and his broader political and media operation. It comes after Trump Media unveiled in July that for a fee it would give banks and ⁠trading firms 'the fastest' access to posts from influential Truth Social accounts, such as the president's, whose posts often move global markets."

All of this is likely cold comfort for Jennings, who has had more than his fair share of public embarrassments in October. Earlier this month, he attracted controversy for warning Trump that if Democrats win control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections, it would be bad for the country because they would simply investigate him.

"My other advice is that all of these arrangements, whether it’s this one or anything else, you really, really have to dot all your I’s, cross all your T’s and anticipate that every single bit of this is going to be investigated, should you lose control of either chamber,” Jennings said, continuing: “And you have to be ready to be fully transparent about that when that day comes.”

Jennings also came under fire for blaming Trump's economic problems on his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.

“His main problem is cost of living and most of the cost-of-living problems that we're dealing with in the country, he inherited," Jennings argued. “We still have a little bit of inflation, but it's largely normalized now. But most of the cost of living, he inherited it.”

He added, “… Certainly to a lot of Americans, you know, when prices spike the way they did during Biden, even going up 2 percent or 3 percent over the last two years, it feels like tacking on even more problems to their lives.”

President Donald Trump gambled that importing more beef—at U.S. ranchers’ expense — would lower prices enough to mitigate the political hit from the ranching industry.

That bet, reports Politico, did not deliver.

“There’s a lot of frustration and anger,” said Glenn Brunkow, the president of the nonpartisan Kansas Farm Bureau and a fifth-generation farmer and stockman in deep-red Pottawatomie County.

It turned out that beef prices have barely budged, U.S. ranchers — a key constituent of the Trump coalition — remain furious, and vulnerable Republicans in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas are fighting for their lives to convince rural voters to turn out in November as farmers “confront economic headwinds fueled by the president’s policies.”

Brunkow told Politico that Trump’s August proclamation to temporarily allow cheaper beef imports from countries like Brazil knocked $200 to $400 off the $2k value of an American farmer’s cow, just to compete on the same market.

“We knew it wouldn’t have much of an effect on the hamburger price in the store. But the markets took that news, and it really knocked the price we get for our cattle down,” Brunkow said.

But then came the skyrocketing diesel prices resulting from Trump’s entirely voluntary war with Iran and the resulting bottleneck of processed Middle East fuel.

“[That] hit us with $6 diesel,” said Brunkow. “This has been pretty, pretty tough to swallow.”

Politico reports Republicans from top beef-producing states, as well as agriculture industry representatives and administration officials (including Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins) all warned Trump that his beef import plan would “hurt ranchers and imperil Republican candidates.” But Trump rolled on with his policy.

Now Trump's stubbornness is decimating Trump’s farming coalition as declining profits hollow out the reliable part of the Republican base.

“It wasn’t worth the headache and what it did to the market,” ranted Jenna Stanton, federal policy director at Western Skies Strategies. “It’s doing exactly what we thought it was going to do, which was nothing.”

Despite this, Trump isn’t backing down, reports White House sources.

“The White House isn’t currently planning to scale back or end the proclamation early, allowing it to expire as intended in November, according to two people familiar with the plans who were granted anonymity to discuss them,” reports Politico.

In many cases, the damage to American farmers is already done, said sources.

“I just think it’s had limited impact on consumer behavior, limited impact on family budgets. And it had a … significant negative impact on producers,” said a person close to the administration.

President Donald Trump has struggled to keep Republicans in purple and blue states in his corner as the 2026 midterm elections approach Election Day. On Friday, as he prepares to campaign with New York's GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, Trump is facing a new embarrassment — only 25 percent of the local candidates from his party want to attend the rally with him.

"Only four out of 16 local Republican candidates and party leaders plan to be on hand to hear Trump make his first public speech in Syracuse in 10 years, according to a survey by Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard," reported Syracuse.com's Mark Weiner on Friday. "Among those giving Trump the snub are the top two elected Republicans in the Syracuse area – Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon and District Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick."

Weiner continued, "Neither GOP candidate seeking New York Senate seats in Central New York – Rich McCarron and James Corl III – will be at the rally. Not a single elected Republican serving in the Onondaga County Legislature said they would be at the event." He added, "Joe Bick, chair of the Onondaga County Republican Committee, the region’s GOP political leader, won’t be in attendance. McMahon, Fitzpatrick, Bick and other GOP officials gave similar explanations about their high-profile absence. They have other commitments with work, family, campaigns or the local apple festival that will keep them away."

McMahon specifically cited that he was "tired" and has "a baby." He explained that "he would meet with Trump if they could have a face-to-face discussion of federal policies that affect the community. But he does not plan to attend the rally."

“Certainly, if there was an opportunity to talk to the president about things that matter to this community, I would find a way to make that happen. But I don’t have a lot of leisure activity time,” McMahon told Weiner.

Other candidates listed excuses such as "I can't make it. Even if I was free, I probably wouldn't go" (James Corl III, candidate in the 50th State Senate District) and Onondaga County Legislator David Knapp, R-LaFayette (the LaFayette Apple Festival).

New York Republicans are now alone in spurning the president. Last month Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, that state's Senate nominee for the GOP, secretly told a group of supporters that Trump's midterms convention hurt them.

“So to be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention — it dropped our numbers," Paxton said. "Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”

Speaking to AlterNet in September, Trump's former communications director Anthony Scaramucci argued Republicans took this long to distance themselves from Trump because they are "cowards."

"I would say to you that they've become cowards," Scaramucci told AlterNet. "They've become self-aggrandizing. We started this interview by me saying that they only care about themselves and their own personal power, and they've become cowards."

President Donald Trump's disappointment at not winning the Nobel Peace Prize was followed by a major move against the International Court, where this year's winner once served as a judge, with the timing suggesting retaliation.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), aiming to weaken its operations by limiting financial transactions and possibly cutting off access to essential services.

The announcement followed the Norwegian Nobel Committee's decision to award the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a South African jurist who was a former judge of the ICC and who has been recognized for her work in promoting international law.

The close timing doesn't prove the sanctions were imposed in response to the Nobel Prize decision. As The New York Times reported, the administration had been planning the measures for months.

Marco Rubio, who is the Secretary of State, made it clear that Washington intended to severely limit the court's activities. Rubio stated, "Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC."

The administration had earlier sanctioned individual judges and prosecutors. On Friday, however, it went much further by targeting the institution itself and could thus force banks, insurers and technology companies to sever ties with the court.

The Nobel Committee's decision gave the growing confrontation a rather unusual turn.

The Nobel winner, now 85, served on the ICC's Appeals Chamber from 2003 to 2008 and earlier led the United Nations' human rights office. She also led a U.N. commission that investigated the conflict in Gaza.

On Truth Social, Trump endorsed his former lawyers' criticism of her record.

When announcing her award, the Nobel Committee specifically pointed out the threats international judicial institutions face.

"The judges – those who guard the thin red line between order and chaos – are therefore highly deserving of our praise," the committee said.

The ICC swiftly denounced the sanctions imposed by Washington, accusing the administration of attempting to obstruct international justice. The court president, Tomoko Akane, said the institution would keep operating on its own even in the face of the restrictions.

The clash comes after Trump has on several occasions stated that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Earlier this week, he said no one in the award's history deserved it more, based on his claim that he had settled eight wars.

The sanctions imposed on Friday also showed Washington's long-standing objections to the International Criminal Court conducting investigations that involve American military personnel and to the issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The court, headquartered in the Netherlands, has 125 member states, including several American allies.

To avoid possible sanctions, its officials have already replaced Microsoft software and arranged alternative financial services.

Historian Timothy D. Snyder knows what is likely coming on the evening of Nov. 3 and it's allegations that the election was "rigged." He wants Americans ready and prepared to respond quickly, if not before he makes the claim.

Speaking to former GOP strategist Steve Schmitt, Snyder said he doesn't want to think of it as first you vote and second you act.

"The other part is being prepared to win," he said, "because I agree with you completely in your forecast. I think this is going to be overwhelming. I think it's going to be bigger than people think basically. And I think, if anything, the Democrats are scared to imagine how big their victory is going to be because if it's big they're going to have to take responsibility for stuff. So, part of it is not just voting and being like, 'oh, what is Trump going to do?' But think, you know what? The people I'm voting for are going to win. And I'm willing to take action along those lines, which means telling people how I voted, telling people what I expected, doing your own media work."

The other thing it means, he said, is that Americans must "call the shot in advance," a pool metaphor for calling which ball will go into which pocket.

"However we think it's going to go, your scenario is very plausible, probably I have some other ideas of what they might do," he continued. "But whatever they do, it's what losers do. And you have to get that out ahead of time and you have to be ready to laugh at it. Like every trick that Trump can play has been played by Viktor Orban, or has been played by somebody else in the last couple of years. You have to get out in front of people and say, look, when they do that, like when Trump claims that he won, that's what he did because he lost, right? And it's the kind of thing that losers do."

In the media space, he said that Democrats must come out ready to tell their story about why they won and how they intend to use that win to deliver on the top issues like the affordability crisis, gas prices and corruption.

"Morning of Nov. 4th we should be thinking about money out of politics, end of corruption. We should be thinking about things that are good that could happen," Snyder said.

Doing that will inoculate everyone against Trump's idea that he really won and that it was all rigged.

"Trump going on TV and saying, well, you know, I'm raising my hand to say that by the way they stole the election again, it will seem a little archaic and silly," Snyder explained. Especially "if you can put it in the context of, 'Hey, we actually have a moment of hope.'"

He warned that letting Trump frame the narrative gives him a better chance of being taken seriously. Instead, he wants Democrats and those around them to frame it as "we're going to start doing really important and transformative stuff, I think that makes the setting much harder for Trump to do the kind of thing that you're describing."

One of the disaster scenarios that conservative retired Judge Michael Luddig warned about is that Republicans could refuse to seat any of the Democratic lawmakers elected. Snyder thinks Trump has likely already had that conversation, along with every other possibility.

"We should deny that Trump is omnipotent, because he's not. And the things that he might wish to happen still depend on other people fulfilling his wishes, and whether they fulfill his wishes are going to depend on how big the Democratic victory is, whether those people think that they might go to prison for what they're doing and also the overall atmosphere."