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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again, we’re seeing American impatience at work.

While early voting is happening, Election Day is on Tuesday, yet the political talk is already focused on congressional leadership contests, the would-be Democratic agenda, Donald Trump’s anticipated “super lame duck” status and all that will follow.

Can we please get through this election first before having to devour competitive speculative articles and punditry about whether Hakeem Jeffries can hold together a strategy-diverse caucus post-election or whether Chuck Schumer will return as a Democratic Senate majority leader when many individual candidates have staked out positions for change?

After all, at the same time, we keep hearing about the dangers of an election denialist Trump government that is willing to undertake a variety of legal, financial, social and political pressures to cast doubt on the outcome of elections. Take a breath: The election count itself could take three weeks in some areas.

Clearly, the administration and its agencies have been adept at filing lawsuits, however legally frivolous, to halt mail ballots, to limit voters, close precincts, and lobby hard about the presence of non-citizen voters that no one else seems to be able to find in sufficient numbers to change an election outcome. There are warnings about the National Guard gearing up for unknown reasons, shared fears that federal agents will seize ballots, and a slew of challenges if votes are close in various states about declaring winners.

Yet even a cursory glance at headlines shows a bevy of concerns about which personalities will emerge more “powerful” when the anticipated Blue Wave hits this week and who will be left behind. Does it really matter who the House minority leader will be if Republicans lose their majority status?

Anticipating Troubles

What may matter more in the anticipation of Election Day are the number of administration policies that have been held back or delayed for execution once we pass Tuesday.

Those Trump policies that will increase pressure on housing and health, and on renewed warfare and upside-down foreign dealings that improve relations with Russia and China over protection of democracies in Europe and Asia is where our attention ought to be.

We know some of what to expect from a cornered Donald Trump.

At the top of this list is the possibility or even probability of renewed warfare in Iran. The Pentagon has been ordered to move a new aircraft carrier group to the Middle East, diplomatic personnel and families have been warned to evacuate in anticipation of retaliatory attacks, and Gulf nations are hard at negotiations with Iran to consider any options to forestall renewed air attacks from the United States and Israel.

No matter how much criticism of an unsuccessful, continuing war situation in the region has filled campaign ads and rallies, Trump is insisting he can do as he wants with our military, that any attempt by Congress to be involved in approving or defunding war efforts is beyond any of his reasoning. The fact is, the military is getting itself ready for an order to renew conflict that may or may not come – with absolutely no assurance that bombing will result in Iran walking away from nuclear weapons aspirations or the full re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz or abandonment of proxy armies that are attacking Israel, Saudi Arabia and Gulf nations working with the U.S.

The lame duck session of Congress will be filled with the election vitriol over the war and whether to continue to finance it,

The delayed domestic agenda reportedly also includes new broadsides against medical abortion and other aspects of intrastate travel for abortion, a doubling down on Homeland Security anti-immigrant campaigns, and more cuts for health insurance coverage for those not covered by their jobs.

Trump’s insistence on making the election about himself – “Pretend I’m on the ballot” – while ignoring the reports on the ground from across the nation, from urban and rural areas, about the effects of high prices from his tariff and war policies while evidence of official corruption seems to multiply by the day is where our attention ought to be. Instead, we’re busily speculating about presidential candidates for 2028 or what happens to Rep. Jim Jordan’s dream to replace Mike Johnson as head of House Republicans.

If we get a decisive result from elections this week and we can get to January actually seating the winners through vote challenges and certification fights, the new Congress will sort itself quickly. If Democrats win, it will become evident quickly how much investigating and how much policy work on prices will be targeted.

It would be more effective for us to focus on what is right before us rather than speculate about personality clashes ahead.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

Polling is looking grim for Republicans ahead of the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3, 2026, due in large part to deep pessimism among the public about the economy.

The last two years have been a rough going for farmers and ranchers in the U.S. Rollbacks to several Department of Agriculture programs have cut available funding and left producers in the dark. Last year, farm groups sued the federal agency after it deleted multiple webpages that mentioned climate change, including some with critical information for planning around extreme weather. (Early this year, the ag department agreed to restore the webpages in a settlement.) Just this month, the USDA cut solar from a popular renewable energy grant program and dealt another setback to farmers who wish to lower their utility bills and pad their incomes by installing solar panels on their land.

Meanwhile, cattle ranchers in the U.S. have been frustrated by high beef prices. The average price of ground beef has been steadily climbing since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching new records in the last two years. Persistent droughts contributing to historically low herd sizes have also added to ranchers’ plight. And President Donald Trump’s various moves to supposedly help lower the price of beef — such as importing more beef from abroad — haven’t helped. Ranchers even say these trade deals undercut their business model.

So heading into the midterm elections, many agricultural producers, once a critical part of Trump’s base, have been clear that they’re aggravated by and disagree with the president. In an apparent attempt to appease these constituents, the USDA has very recently unlocked billions of dollars in support for farmers, as well as additional money for ranchers.

Whether it’s enough to smooth over the tension that farmers and ranchers are feeling remains to be seen. The president of the Iowa Farmers Union, Aaron Lehman, said that U.S. farmers “have needed help for months” and “never should have been put in this position.”

The new funding also underlines the administration’s commitment to supporting fossil fuels, even as the use of these energy sources emit greenhouse gases that further warm the planet. On October 19, the president announced $8 billion would be made available to help farmers make up money they lost due to high diesel prices.

The process through which farmers apply for and receive said funding is still unclear. In a press release, the ag department stated it would provide “simple, proportional support to producers” for part of the losses they incurred during the 2026 crop year. Responding to a request for more details from Grist, a USDA representative said, “President Trump has been the most pro-farmer president in our nation’s history, and the Harvest Fuel Relief Program is the latest action to deliver for them. As USDA works to implement the program, we are actively reviewing all available data to determine payments which are expected to be finalized and processed soon.”

Farmers and ranchers are both incredibly reliant on diesel as a fuel source. Much of the equipment that they use — like tractors, combines, and trucks for moving crops or livestock from one place to another — run on diesel. But diesel prices have been increasing due to the Iran war, which has led to significant supply chain disruptions. A Democrat-led congressional report found that U.S. farmers are on track to spend an additional $2.4 billion on diesel specifically due to Trump’s war in Iran.

The timing of Trump’s $8 billion bailout program for farmers who lost money due to high diesel prices is also ironic, given that the ag department just made it harder for farmers to switch to more efficient energy sources like solar and wind.

Mike Lavender, the policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, called these farmer payments “a failing solution” in a statement. The reality is, he said, that “countless farms nationwide remain in crisis: Farm bankruptcies hit a six-year high this spring, and farmers are carrying heavier debt loads and are more pessimistic about their future.”

On October 26, just over a week before Election Day, the USDA also announced $57 million in funding specifically for ranchers. The funding will help independent producers expand their meat-processing capacity, according to the department’s press release.

Additional measures to help agricultural producers boost their bottom line include an announcement yesterday that the USDA will purchase nearly $500 million in agricultural commodities from U.S. producers.

These bailout programs are also coming at a time when the nation’s foremost agricultural policy remains in limbo. The last farm bill, a legislative package that once upon a time was renewed every five years and controls everything from crop insurance to conservation programs, was passed in 2018. Currently, competing versions of a new farm bill sit in the House of Representatives and the Senate, but advocates say much of the future of the bill hinges on the upcoming midterm elections. For farmers, this period of time represents how the Trump administration is trying to appeal to their needs without a guiding vision for the future.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-cut-funding-for-farmers-then-unlocked-billions-for-them-before-election-day/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.