gulf of america

So now that I’ve told you how I see the critical midterm races going on Tuesday, I want to take a few minutes to tell you what I think about you …

There’s no reason to duck.

When I typed earlier this week that, “the past two years have been the longest decade of my life,” it seemed to resonate with many of you good people, who have been brave enough to care about their faltering country since the orange devil came along dragging his racist stench behind him.

When America did the unimaginable two Novembers ago, and voted to put this bigot and proven enemy of our country back in our White House, it was just too much to process for any sane person who really does care about the United States of America.

I became dizzy as I watched the results roll in on Election Night 2024. The PTSD from the 2016 November Nightmare washed over me as the numbers relentlessly poured in from those must-have districts dotted across the country, and were delivered in a gory shade of blood-red.

I’d seen this horror movie before, and at 11 p.m. CST, I turned my TV off and sat quietly in a complete state of shock.

It was official: We could no longer trust far too many of our friends and family, who believed a narcissistic, racist, America- and woman-attacking maniac belonged in the most powerful job in the world inside our White House.

I didn’t stir until 4 a.m.

I considered how I would tackle the next four years, while rewinding what had gone so terribly wrong the previous four. When I had worn myself out and the smoke stopped seeping from my ears, I drifted off.

When I emerged from those three-hours of hard-fought sleep, the shock had still not subsided, and I typed a very raw, and righteous piece, HURT, for all of us:

“If the majority of my country is OK with an America-attacking, vulgar racist, whose only true talent is the ability to somehow always go lower, I find it terribly, terribly sad and wildly dangerous.
This does not make me a better or worse person than anyone else, it just makes me, me, and I am very proud and comfortable with that. And if you stood for what is good ... and right … and decent, you should be plenty proud of yourselves, too.”

Three days later, anger had replaced my melancholy, and I had a message for Trump and his morally busted voters:

“To Trump supporters I say this: If you have somehow twisted yourself into some self-righteous pretzel to justify your vote for a violent, racist, election-denying fascist YOU are the problem in this country, not us. This has happened many times before over the centuries with your type to no good end. If you would read even ONE history book your party wants burned you’d be forced to understand this, and maybe even deal with it. Oh, and here’s a dirty, little secret: The elites who run your abhorrent party fully know all this, and are using you for their terrible devices. As long as you support this, there is nothing you can say that I will ever listen to. You are a complete moral wreck. A mess. A five-alarm fire. You say you want cheaper gas and eggs, but fawn over the horrible man and circumstances that helped lead to their high cost in the first place with his subhuman response to a once-in-a-century pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of us needlessly. Even wearing masks to help prevent the spread of this invisible killer was too much to ask of you. Seriously, go straight to hell.

I reintroduce those pieces today, because I think it is instructive to see where we’ve been, and what we’ve been through. It was going to be a long four years, but we had each other to lean on, and as long as we stayed together, we would continue to be a force to be reckoned with.

After all, we have been right about everything since the initial blast on Nov. 8, 2016 ...

We told anybody brave enough to listen to the truth who the grotesque Trump was, and what he was capable of, and on Jan. 6, 2021, when he leveled the worst attack on our Capitol since 1812, he proved us right.

He rallied his racist Orcs, turned them loose in our capital city, and did nothing for three-plus hours but root for his attack’s success. He didn’t bat an eye when they came for his Vice President or the Speaker of the House, or while overmatched law enforcement officers were kicked into the curb and beaten with flag poles. Finally, when order was slowly being restored and the attack had failed, he took to the airways and grudgingly ordered his attackers to go home, but not before telling them that he loved them …

He told them that he loved them.

That nothing was done about the attack still burns holes in our stomachs. We voted for change in 2020, yes, but also voted for justice that was never delivered.

I will speak for myself here, but I will never forgive Joe Biden or his attorney general for this. There is nothing you can tell me that will quash my rage. For four years, I wrote endless pieces, and implored Merrick Garland TO DO SOMETHING, because if he didn’t the lawless, dead-inside Trump would emerge stronger, and set his beady eyes on getting even with the patriots who had the audacity to stand up against him and his odious party.

Nothing was done, and once again we were right: The 300 lb. cockroach survived and emerged from the corner of his garish country club in Florida to finish us off.

When Biden welcomed Trump back to our White House in front of that crackling fire just one week after the 2024 election, I never wanted to lay eyes on him again. He pardoned his family, and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

I shake typing that, I really do.

Since that sinful day, we have done what we can, while every awful thing we said would come to pass — and more —has played out in front of our tired eyes.

We watched as Trump attacked our government and gorged himself with our money …innocent people were rounded up and murdered in our streets by masked men … troops were sent off to die for his profit … landmark voting legislation was incinerated by his bought-off Supreme Court … our air, water and animals were purposely poisoned just to make another buck …

But we are still standing.

We did not submit.

We rolled out of the rack each day, rallied, and did what little we could do to keep the fire burning, and hope alive.

We are the true patriots in America and would have voted every single Republican out Tuesday whether gas prices were $2 a gallon or $5 a gallon ... Whether we were in some dangerous, idiotic war with Iran or not … Whether our healthcare benefits were in jeopardy or not …

We understand right from wrong.

We are the people who are not ready to move on from Donald Trump’s attack on our country January 6, 2021, and all the harm he has done to this nation, and never will be.

This is not about the price of eggs, it is about the terrible price we will continue to pay, if we can’t put down this fascist regime.

We will not quit fighting, raging, and working until freedom rings, because by God, THIS WILL HAPPEN.

A slow death is too good for Trump. I want to see him beaten. I want to see the fear in those beady eyes when he has nowhere to run and nowhere to hide but that dirty country club corner.

This can only happen if we prevail at the polls on Tuesday.

We have been through a helluva lot, because we have allowed ourselves to feel all of it. We have not backed down. We have not tuned it out. We have served our country like very few generations before us, by fighting a dangerous, homegrown enemy of America who aims to end us.

No matter what happens Tuesday, and I do believe we are in for a historic night, I want you to know this, my fighting friends:

You were on the right side of the fight.

I can pay you no higher compliment.

Now let’s go win this thing.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist, who headed newsrooms, and worked as a reporter in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.

With the midterms upon us, the nation is on edge. Political analysts, writers, and resistance organizers are jittery and leery, aware that our efforts may not be enough.

People who read beyond the headlines understand that we’re at the fork, a pivotal moment that will take the nation in one direction…. or another. They also know that an adjudicated insurrectionist who assembled an armed mob to cling to power the last time he lost is at it again, only this time he’s more dangerous.

The J6 tinderbox has grown larger and more flammable, thanks to Congressional inaction, because the insurrectionist has now formed his own Praetorian Guard and commands the U.S. military. A looming unknown is: what percentage of U.S. service members will take their oath to the Constitution seriously enough to refuse to follow any illegal commands? How many would shoot protesting Americans if a roided-out, dry drunk SecDef gave the order?

A master of reality TV and little else, Trump manufactured an early fraud narrative with no supporting evidence to blunt his midterm losses. Claiming that immigrants and Democrats are fraudulently voting, Trump then instructed his own supporters to cheat, and to vote whether they’ve registered or not.

Democratic control of one or both congressional houses, as is now projected, will check Trump’s corruption from all sides. A Democratic Party majority will quickly investigate the billions the Trumps have pocketed, curtail Hegseth’s unhinged remake of the military, and rein in oligarchic self-dealing. It’s no mystery why Trump has dialed illegal election interference to 11.

Trump’s unprecedented attacks on the midterms have exhausted voters already too tired to keep track. His multi-pronged assault ran the gamut of un-American tricks including bribery, seizing ballots, threats to deploy armed agents, attempts to change mail-in voting laws, gerrymandering, threats to imprison election officials, nonstop lawsuits, and, looming large, election disinformation. Even though the Constitution grants control over elections to the states, Trump can’t stop grabbing at that power with his own sticky fingers, and his instincts will get worse before they get better.

Trump has converted the DOJ into an election interference pitbull. After the Supreme Court slapped down his efforts to control mail-in voting, Trump got busy attacking the justices and suing individual states. Last week the DOJ sued to try to pre-emptively block the certification of Alaska’s Senate race but only if Trump’s candidate loses in a close race to Democrat candidate Mary Peltola.

Peltola’s emergency motion to dismiss points out that the DOJ is interfering on Trump’s behalf, “raising issues governed exclusively by state law that were (already) resolved by the Alaska Supreme Court months ago.” As of this writing, Peltola’s motion remains pending and is expected to be granted.

Trump similarly tried to force California and Washington State to disrupt their vote counts by seeking to “set aside vote-by-mail ballots from persons identified by the Federal Government likely to be noncitizens.” An appeals court dismissed the California suit on October 26, and Washington officials refused Trump’s request on October 28, in part because Trump’s “lists of ineligible voters” are inaccurate by the DOJ’s own admission.

Courts have blocked most of Trump’s efforts to insert himself into the midterms. The primary source of constitutional authority to regulate congressional elections is the Elections Clause found at Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution. That clause empowers states — not the federal government, not the president — to determine the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding elections.

In addition, the Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right to vote, barring states from imposing substantial burdens on the right unless those burdens advance free elections. Laws requiring people to register prior to voting, or requiring them to vote at assigned places, are deemed reasonable under the Elections Clause. A president seizing state voter lists would not be reasonable, because there is no foundational authority under which the executive branch can control state-run elections to begin with.

Trump’s DOJ began demanding states’ voter registration lists and confidential voter data nonetheless in May 2025. States controlled by both parties refused to turn them over, and the DOJ sued. As of Sept. 30, the initial cases against Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin have all been dismissed.

Across the U.S., tens of thousands of volunteers, poll workers, and concerned citizens have stepped forward to help protect the midterms. For the first time in our nation’s history, election officials are teaching them what to do if armed federal agents or soldiers show up, even though their presence at the polls is prohibited under federal law. On top of threatening to send armed ICE agents and the military, Trump’s DOJ is sending an unprecedented number of agents, (over 1,000) to “observe and monitor” voting in high-population areas in every state, and election workers are preparing for when agents try to intimidate voters, as recently happened in Wyoming.

As Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows recently observed, “This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections. It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”

It doesn’t just seem like it. Trump doesn’t recognize state authority over elections or anything else, just as he doesn’t recognize congressional authority, Supreme Court authority, or the law of the land. Ignorant of U.S. history and all things un-filigreed, Trump’s zookeepers have allowed him to think he is the law.

Back when Republicans protected something other than pedophiles and graft, states’ rights were the holy grail of limited federal power. Now conservatives have sacrificed their principles to the pursuit of unchecked power, and states’ rights are a quaint memory.

The only solution, for now, is to vote and make sure everyone you know does the same. Next steps will be determined by the outcome, and how the cornered rat reacts to it.

I am going to tell you why I think the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released on Monday a 53-page report presenting new evidence of Donald Trump’s involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-crime syndicate, efforts by the Department of Justice to cover it up, and the Democrats' call for a special counsel. But before I do, let me quote the report directly.

Why? Because it's important when evidence suggests the president of the United States lied about his involvement with the world's most notorious child-sex trafficker, and because the Washington press corps had decided to meet the moment with a collective shrug.

As Ana Marie Cox said, with appropriate outrage, "the New York Times and Washington Post, and all the major cable networks, have covered CheesecakeGate more thoroughly ... (A search of the media monitoring service Snapstream showed the three major cable news networks combined mentioned the rape allegation against Trump just twice, whereas the word 'cheesecake' has received 368 mentions in the same span.)"

So, as a public service, here are some quotes:

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it. ...

The evidence, much of it still hiding behind redactions in DOJ vaults, shows that Trump lied about kicking Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club and strongly suggests that Epstein introduced Trump to his wife Melania. The evidence demonstrates that Trump has lied about the nature and extent of his relationship with Epstein dozens of times—incriminating behavior for someone who supposedly has nothing to hide. ...

Above all, the actual evidence we have seen — as shared in the accounts and stories of 11 women, each described below — indicates that Trump abused, assaulted, and even raped numerous women alongside, and in coordination with, the most infamous sex trafficker in history.

These stories are united by time, place, and the distinct factual similarities in how Trump and Epstein pursued, manipulated, and abused these women. With one exception, these accounts of sexual assault and conspiracy involve episodes that took place between 1992 and 1997 in New York City and Palm Beach, at a time when Trump and Epstein were ‘close friends’ and participated in a shadowy subculture organized around young female modeling.

Witnesses speak consistently of modeling pageants and parties where young women and girls were forced into predatory situations and routinely taken advantage of, abused, and raped. They give similar accounts of the competitive and sinister relationship between Epstein and Trump and how it was channeled into their shared pursuit of young women.

Taken together, the evidence provided by the stories of these 11 women, and the documentary evidence that supports and corroborates their stories, indisputably meets and surpasses FBI’s standard for opening a full investigation: that “activity constituting a federal crime … may have occurred."

Julie K Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who knows more than anyone about all things Epstein, said yesterday that much of the material in the report comes from public records and documents released after passage late last year of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Brown said what’s new is an allegation from a former beauty contestant from Switzerland by the name of Beatrice Keul. She told the committee that Jeffrey Epstein arranged a meeting with Trump at the time one of his pageants. She said he raped her in 1993 in New York.

Here's the key part of the report:

Later that day, Donald Trump’s representative invited Keul to go upstairs at the Plaza Hotel to meet with Trump. Believing this meeting to be a lucky break for the purpose of furthering her career and education, Keul accompanied Trump’s representative upstairs. He ushered her into the suite, where upon entering, Trump reportedly grabbed Keul from behind and forcibly raped her; in the process, tearing her dress and causing bleeding and bruising on multiple parts of her body. Keul described the rape as ‘brutal.’ Following the assault, according to Keul’s report, Trump sat her on the edge of the bed, repeated his promises to arrange for a visa and NYU admission, and made her promise she would keep quiet, saying, “[T]he show must go on.”

The report said Keul is one of five women to directly accuse the president of "raping or sexually assaulting them in Epstein’s company or direct physical presence":

• Beatrice Keul, whose account is comprehensively set forth for the first time in this report, credibly alleges that Trump violently raped her at a November 1993 pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and that Epstein, Trump, and others used this pageant as a “hunting ground” to prey on vulnerable young women and girls;

• Stacey Williams, who offered a detailed and corroborated account of Trump sexually assaulting her in the early 1990s while she was alone with him and Epstein in an office at Trump Tower;

• Jill Harth, who has also publicly detailed Trump aggressively pursuing and violently sexually assaulting her and another woman in 1994 at a Mar-a-Lago party where Epstein and Trump were the only men present;

• Katie Johnson, who gave FBI a detailed account of her repeated rape at the hands of Trump and Epstein in 1994 in New York City when she was a minor; and

• A Jane Doe, who offered FBI a graphic account of Trump assaulting her when she was a minor in the mid-1980s in New York by forcibly pushing her head down to his exposed penis.

That's the what. As to why the Judiciary Democrats released the report, the reason isn't what you think. It isn't because there's a midterm next week. It's no October Surprise. It is not going to change the election's outcome. That's why the press corps is ignoring it. The ghastly substance of it – evidence of violent sex crimes against women and girls by the president – doesn't matter enough. It would be news if it affected an election. It won't. So it's not news.

But the report is a kind of preview. This is what we can expect from a House controlled by the Democrats in the two years leading up to the next presidential election. Impeachment is still a question, but there is no downside to subjecting Trump to endless grinding exposure. The weaker he gets politically, the more cracks there will be in his coalition. If you think he's unpopular now, wait until Robert Garcia, the Judiciary's ranking Democrat, gets going.

But I don't want to get lost in the politics. These are real people. These are real crimes against them. They should see justice. More broadly, we cannot hope for our republic to survive if elites like Trump, who act with impunity for the law and morality, are allowed to carry on without fear of accountability. Trump will probably never see a jail cell (he's 80, after all) but he is not alone. Many elites enabled him along the way, because they thought something was in it for them. There must be a price for impunity, and someone must pay it.

This report isn't going to affect the election. It's not going to bring justice. And it's certainly not going to restore law and order. But I hope it's the first of many steps toward that end.

Abdul El-Sayed was confronted recently by a man known as Tommy. Tommy wanted Michigan's Democratic Senate candidate to disavow Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. The implicit allegation is AES is in cahoots with the terrorist organization, because he's Muslim and his lineage is Egyptian, and if he does not disavow them, then he's one of them.

In the video below, you can see AES turn Tommy's religious bigotry into an opportunity to remind everyone of the meaning of the First Amendment. He deftly turns things around so that he, the Muslim, is the defender of religious freedom while Tommy, the self-identified Christian, would rather codify his faith into law. Takeaway: Who's the real radical here?

The video went viral and provoked a flurry of online commentary. One of the best commentaries was Reverend Dan Schultz's. He's a Wisconsin pastor, contributor to the Editorial Board, and my pal. His 14 points are reproduced here with his kind permission.

1. El-Sayed was definitely prepared for that kind of question from that kind of questioner, but he also was able to take advantage of a couple of big holes in GOP strategy, such as it is.
2. The premise of Tommy's attempt at a gotcha question was based in Christian nationalism, sure, but even more so in Christian normalism, ie, the assumption that "normal" voters are Christians.
3. The "nationalism" part comes in the further assumption that normal Christians reject Islam as antithetical to their faith, and want conservative Christian values written into governance.
4. There's more, too: the question seems designed to tap into fears about Michigan's rapidly-growing Arab population, and tap into out-state resentment of the Detroit metro area.
5. I don't think Tommy thought he was going to turn the room against El-Sayed. More likely, he was trying to get El-Sayed to commit some gaffe that could be shared on social media — but there's a reason people like Tommy pull these stunts in towns like Caro, not Dearborn.
6. What Tommy may not have known is that many of Michigan's Arabs are in fact Christians, maybe up to half of them. So it's hard to other them on that score.
7. And while this crowd seemed to be mostly El-Sayed supporters, it doesn't seem like anyone was too inclined to othering, on the basis of religion, or race, or geography. I heard some pretty loud cheering for El-Sayed's repeated "or no faith."
8. The conservative base seems to have convinced themselves that most voters share their biases and preferences. That might have worked in 1980s Michigan, and in 2024 Michigan, voters might have ignored the nationalism in hopes of getting a better economy.
9. But in 2026, Republicans have failed so dismally on the economy and, well, any other kind of governance that it's easy for voters to see that all they've got is the white Christian nationalism.
10. That gives someone like El-Sayed the opening to speak and react confidently. He knows Tommy's coming at him with a bluff and a weak hand. The only people who care about him rejecting the Muslim Brotherhood aren't going to vote for him anyway, so he doesn't have to dodge or weave. He can just attack.
11. And attack he does, brilliantly. I thought the bit about the Constitution was great, not because it's a secular counterweight to Christian chauvinism, but because El-Sayed framed it perfectly as a neutral operating system that Americans buy into as the rules of the game.
12. That's the real weight of his counterpunch: not that Tommy is a bigot (though he kind of is), but that Tommy won't agree to play by the same set of rules he demands El-Sayed play by. Who's the outlier here?
13. Anyway, none of this is brilliant or original insight. It's just helpful in understanding the corner Republicans have painted themselves into, in Michigan and nationally. They have fundamentally misunderstood the electorate, and it may cost them for a really long time to come.
14. To be pithy about it, if you're going to run the "divide and conquer" flim-flam, you have to convince the marks there's something in it for them. The GOP can't do that, which leaves the opening for somebody like El-Sayed to expose the con for what it is.