media bias

Trump biographer says army of MAGA 'buffoons' will be a midterm disaster

President Donald Trump is building another army of MAGA "buffoon" candidates for the coming midterms, but according to his one-time biographer, his absence from the ballot is setting up the perfect conditions for a GOP disaster in November.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career, including several books about his chaotic first term. In the latest edition of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he echoed the growing sentiment that many voters simply will not show up for the midterms, all because the president is not at the top of the ballot, leaving his army of "buffoons" missing the support of their "ultimate buffoon."

“There’s an interesting pattern of men who won’t admit to their wives that they are voting for Donald Trump, and then they vote for Donald Trump,” Wolff said. “The dynamic is different in this midterm election because he’s not on the ballot. So, you know, the buffoons who are running in his name don’t have the luxury of being the ultimate buffoon, as it were... You might like to vote for the greatest buffoon of all time. But the mini-buffoons, you don’t really want... Ken Paxton. Do you really want to vote for Ken Paxton?”

Wolff's co-host Joanna Coles put forward another theory for why Trump overperformed expectations in 2016 and 2024: many people do not like to admit they like him, especially when pollsters come knocking. It also seems that this same dynamic does not apply to his many MAGA-friendly endorsements.

“I think a lot of people don’t want to admit that they support Donald Trump,” Coles explained. “They don’t want to admit they like his party, so they don’t admit it. And then, right up in their final run to the privacy of the voting booth, they can finally admit they do like him. Yeah, no, they would prefer him to the other candidates.”

Wolff added later that the different sort of presence Trump has on the midterm ballot will prove to be a net-negative for Republicans, given the growing voter disdain for his leadership.

“Donald Trump is not on the ballot, but Donald Trump is all over the ballot,” Wolff said. “He is the subject... We’re in a situation where the specter of Donald Trump is on the ballot, and that’s a negative, rather than Donald Trump in person being on the ballot, which turns out, inexplicably, to be a positive.”

Trump himself has acknowledged this theory about his effect on turnout when he is on the ballot, and is reportedly fond of the idea, even as it leaves the GOP adrift without him. He has, in recent statements, urged voters to act as if he were on the ballot this year, though it remains unclear if and how well those pleas will work out.

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How Trump's attempt to prove the 'deep state' is real crashed and burned

President Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that a so-called "deep state" has stymied him, from claiming they were behind the multiple investigations into his alleged illegality to arguing they undermined his foreign policies.

"A botched leak of purportedly explosive government files to a prominent conservative online personality was supposed to offer proof of what the Trump administration and its allies have long alleged: that a little-known office inside the US state department, created to fight foreign propaganda, had secretly become a tool for domestic censorship," reported The Guardian's Joseph Gedeon on Sunday. "Two former high-ranking officials at the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a target of Republican ire that lost its funding in 2024 and was disbanded after Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, say the documents show nothing of the kind."

He added, "Instead, they argue, the files are a symptom of a protracted and bitter political fight over an office that spent nearly a decade tracking and countering foreign influence operations, particularly from Russia, China and Iran. And the state department is now resuming some of this work in other parts of its operation, including plans – laid out in a proposal reviewed by the Guardian – to pay social media influencers across south-east Asia as part of an $11m campaign to counter Chinese propaganda."

Gedeon added that the State Department's Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, provided the files related to the GEC to a journalist known as "DataRepublican," Jennica Pounds, who later balked at publishing them because she believed they were furnished in an attempt to "entrap" her.

"Rogers, who denied this claim, then published the files herself, claiming officials inside the center 'betrayed their stated mission,'" Gedeon wrote. "The files included a 2022 GEC report on “gendered disinformation”, a flashpoint in the culture wars."

Throughout the report, Gedeon reveals that the Trump administration utterly failed to demonstrate that it had ever been sabotaged by the GEC. Instead, as its ability to effectively monitor the rest of the world has deteriorated under Trump's watch, the administration has revived many of the functions initially provided by the GEC — though they refuse to directly admit that is what they are doing.

“Are they trying to re-create it? Probably,” center's former acting deputy coordinator Carrie Gaux told The Guardian. “But now they’re spending a lot more tax dollars doing that, trying to get contractors to do some of the stuff that we were doing.”

Goux also told Gedeon, “The US has lost their seat at the table to do that, and that’s unfortunate. I hope we can gain it back, but we’re losing trust too, and that’s significant.”

Ironically, the Trump administration's flawed war against the GEC was unintentionally highlighted by their botched rollout of the revelatory documents.

“In Pounds’s portentous telling, an unnamed official—soon after revealed to be Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department—had offered to leak her government documents about Cuba to publish as an ‘exclusive,’” wrote The Bulwark's Will Sommer at the time. “While Pounds was initially enthusiastic, markings on the documents prompted her to panic that she was being set up. Had she published the documents, Pounds felt, she would’ve exposed herself to criminal prosecution. She took the news of her supposed entrapment directly to her audience.”

He added, “The idea that Trump administration officials would conspire to send Pounds to prison is bizarre on its face. After all, Pounds is an administration favorite. Her tweets claiming to have data to justify Elon Musk’s cuts aimed at USAID and other government agencies made her an out-of-nowhere star during the DOGE era, even though she didn’t seem to have a solid grasp of how government spending actually worked.”

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Wile E. Coyote vs. Trumpism —and the movie Hollywood didn't want you to see

In the age of President Donald Trump, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has been gutted and the Food and Drug Administration is being run by quacks. Because the government no longer protects the public from predatory financial institutions or irresponsible purveyors of food and medicine, Americans are being exploited by banks and credit unions, as well as consuming dangerous foods from glass-riddled bread to diarrhea-inducing lettuce.

If this is an unusually serious way to introduce the review of a Looney Tunes movie, that's because "Coyote vs. Acme" has a surprisingly somber story. Starring Will Forte, Lana Condor, PJ Byrne and John Cena and directed by Dave Green off a script by Samy Burch, "Coyote vs. Acme" tells the story of the Warner Bros. cartoon Wile E. Coyote (who never speaks here, although he occasionally piped up in the cartoons) as he sues the Acme Corporation for selling him defective products in his ongoing quest to capture the Road Runner (Eric Bauza). The coyote and road runner have been engaged in slapstick antics over dozens of short cartoons since 1949, but they have never been the subject of their own feature-length motion picture. Here, though, the titular coyote recruits the services of lawyers Kevin and Paige Avery (Forte and Condor) to prove that Acme should be held accountable for his pain and suffering... or, at least, that is how it seems at first.

A work of genius

The genius of "Coyote vs. Acme" — and I do not use the term "genius" lightly here — is that beneath the characteristically hilarious cartoon antics, this is a film filled with surprises and subtext. It explicitly references the myth of Sisyphus, an ancient Corinthian king condemned to an afterlife of forever rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down whenever it nears the top. The modern French philosopher Albert Camus argued that Sisyphus' punishment, instead of being torture, was actually a form of paradise, writing in his 1942 essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" that "Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."

Camus concluded, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The beauty of "Coyote vs. Acme" is that it reimagines its hapless hero, the coyote, as an aspirational rather than tragic figure, his perpetual failures reminding us that the journey as well as the destination are both worth savoring, even when they do not wind up being exactly what we expect. On top of this existential meditation, "Coyote vs. Acme" is also a scathing commentary on corporate America, with the Acme Corporation serving as a stand-in for the corrupt mega-businesses that dominate our real world. Even though life is meant to be a struggle, that doesn't mean those who live it should be subject to the whims of those with great power and no ethics, a point that "Coyote vs. Acme" makes through the villainous lawyers Buddy Crane (Cena) and Bill Pellicano (Byrne), who are led by a CEO and cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn (Bauza). In the context of "Coyote vs. Acme," Wile E. Coyote is simultaneously hilarious punchline and heartbreaking punching bag. His plight reminds us of another intellectual, American humorist Mark Twain, whose description of coyotes in the 1872 book "Roughing It" inspired his animated counterpart.

The coyote, Twain wrote, is "a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.”

A great kiddie flick

If this seems too heady for little ones, no worries. At the packed screening I attended on an early Friday afternoon, the children hooted and hollered at the wall-to-wall gags with such glee that I would have smiled with nostalgia (I, too, was raised on Looney Tunes) even if I wasn't often chuckling myself (which I was). Like all great family movies, "Coyote vs. Acme" works on two levels — it has deep philosophical and social commentary for the adults, juvenile jokes for the kids and a fast-paced, funny story that works for both groups. If there is any justice in the world, "Coyote vs. Acme" will be the first Looney Tunes movie to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (six have won Best Animated Short Film, all between 1947 and 1958 and none starring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner). Even if other great animated features are released in 2026, it will be impossible for any of them to match "Coyote vs. Acme" in combining top notch writing, comedy and animation with a historical pedigree going back decades.

Additionally, an Oscar win would be the ultimate triumphant note for a movie that Warner Bros. didn't even want you to see. For context there, I refer to a recent summary from Decider.

"Unlike those more grown-up movies we mentioned, it’s not the content of 'Coyote vs. Acme' that caused Warner Bros. to drop the movie," explained Decider's Jesse Hassenger. "(It’s a solid PG, a rarity these days.) It’s not the quality, either. (We’ll get to that shortly.) It was part of a cost-saving measure that also claimed the not-yet-finished Batgirl and a Scooby-Doo animated feature. Executives decided it would be more worthwhile to claim these movies as tax write-offs than actually attempt to make money by releasing them. To claim said write-off, the movies would have to be, essentially, locked in a corporate vault and never shown."

Given the plot and historical context of "Coyote vs. Acme," that backstory resonates more profoundly than it otherwise would.

At the time I write this, Warner Bros. is being greedily eyed by David Ellison, the billionaire nepo baby who seems determined to purchase major media companies and turn them into bastions of pro-Trump bootlicking (see his alleged firing of comedian Stephen Colbert and confirmed terminations of principled journalists at "60 Minutes"). While "Coyote vs. Acme"'s suppression had nothing directly to do with Trump, indirectly that act of censorship is quite consistent with Trump-era values. Instead of sharing a great work of art with the public, Warner Bros. wanted to bury it just so they could make a few extra bucks. (Ultimately, after widespread public outcry, they sold it to distributor Ketchup Entertainment.) More to the point, at a time when Trump is destroying institutions that protect the public from oligarchical avarice, "Coyote vs. Acme" launches a missile directly into the "might makes right" ethos promulgated by Trump and his supporters.

Closing with Chris Dodd

As I watched "Coyote vs. Acme," I thought of my 2025 Democracy at Work interview with former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), who co-authored the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. When I asked him about Trump's destruction of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which Dodd-Frank created, the erstwhile lawmaker had a profound observation about Trump's larger agenda.

“That is, of course, just to destroy the ability of consumers, individually and generally, to have the kind of protections that they deserve to have, particularly people who live paycheck to paycheck trying to survive,” Dodd pointed out. It is very much by design that, in Trump's America, everyone who isn't in cahoots with Acme is Wile E. Coyote, living in want, "always hungry" and "always poor, out of luck, and friendless," always one greedy and cruel business decision away from humiliation and physical hardship.

Unlike the coyote, though, there is nothing noble in America's ongoing fanatical refusal to quit Trump. I'm reminded of the Spanish American philosopher George Santayana, whose definition of "fanatic" inspired one of Chuck Jones' rules governing Wile E. Coyote's behavior: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."

Because it captures all of these themes, albeit in its own looney way, "Coyote vs. Acme" is a literal work of genius, the very description that Wile E. Coyote perennially uses to describe himself. It is both timeless and very much a product of our own time, a light-hearted comedy romp and a genuine contemplative look at the meaning of life.

There is not a single person to whom I would not recommend "Coyote vs. Acme."

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Trump has a pain problem as three-time voters drop him like a hot potato

There have been abundant signs of an internal split hurting the Republican Party during President Donald Trump's second term. From seemingly-personal feuds like the one between talk show hosts Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro to the growing divide over Trump's war against Iran, it has become increasingly difficult for staunch supporters of Trump to continue to persuade non-MAGA Republicans to go along with them.

A new analysis from a political commentator illustrates how this may cost Trump during the 2026 midterm elections.

"Much has been said about possible splits in MAGA land and disappointment in that world with Trump’s agenda and his promises to avenge their grievances," wrote New York Magazine's Ed Kilgore on Sunday. "But MAGA folk are not his problem. According to the latest major poll, from Economist-YouGov, 91 percent of self-identified MAGA supporters give Trump a thumbs-up for his job performance, with 62 percent strongly approving of it. But presidential job approval drops to 80 percent among Republicans generally and is also at 80 percent among 2024 Trump voters."

Mentioning that Trump is planning on making himself front-and-center of the midterm elections on the grounds that will motivate voters, Kilgore wrote that "this may be fundamentally misguided. The people who can’t get enough of Donald Trump already view every election and every political event as representing an opportunity to display their love for him. Forcing others to make their midterm votes reflect their opinion of the president could backfire. His overall job-approval ratio, after all, has been far underwater (currently minus-19.6 percent at Silver Bulletin) all year."

The pundit also pointed out that Trump's attempts to vilify Democrats also appear to be fizzling out.

"Calling the opposition as 'Dumocrats' or 'communists' is already getting old," Kilgore wrote. "Pretending Democrats are all eager to reopen the borders so that criminal aliens can rape and kill while they draw welfare benefits and illegally vote might appeal to Trump’s MAGA superfans, but it’s unclear how much traction that gets elsewhere. It would probably make the president crazy if past Trump voters are just too 'meh' about him to get off the couch. Doing a better job addressing public concerns over the economy would help. But time’s running out for that, and Trump continues to convey the sense that he’s insulted by the perceived need to convince people they’ve never had it so good. It’s downright discouraging."

In addition to Kilgore's analysis, there are anecdotal observations indicating that Trump is losing his own voters. Speaking with MS NOW earlier in August, two three-time Trump voters from Iowa expressed deep dissatisfaction with his performance.

"The prices haven't gone down," one voter said. I don't know, I'm just, I'm over it, I think, over the Trump thing, the Trump wagon — whatever you want to call it."

According to another, “It's hard. It makes me feel like I'm a horrible mother sometimes because I'm stressing about what I'm going to do — do I have enough money to put gas in, or do I need to buy eggs and milk for my child? Or do I need to not go to work every day to make that money because gas prices are so expensive?”

That voter continued, “And mind you, it could be my fault — I do work in cleaning, but still, that's a 45-minute drive. We're putting 80 bucks in every three days, tops, maybe. It's just hard to feel good when everything's going downhill, I feel like. It's supposed to be going up, and sometimes, yes, it is up, and then all of a sudden it just goes down. And then we're always told, you know, ‘this is going to change’ or ‘I'm going to make this better’ or ‘we're going to make this better’ — but where's it at? We're not seeing it at all.”

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Republicans must 'pitch a perfect game' as Trump threatens GOP House

WASHINGTON — With less than 70 days until midterm elections, Democrats remain favored to regain the majority in the U.S. House.

President Donald Trump’s anemic approval ratings amid the war in Iran, concerns over the economy and a coalitional shift within the party mark some of the largest headwinds facing Republicans heading into November, according to election analysts and political scientists interviewed by States Newsroom.

Though the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting push could help them shore up several seats and the battleground of competitive districts stands relatively small, Democrats maintain an edge to win the House, said Erin Covey, an editor specializing in U.S. House races for the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

Photo illustration by Getty Images

“I would say that Republicans have a path to holding the House, but they kind of have to pitch a perfect game at this point in the cycle,” Covey said.

The GOP’s current House majority stands at 218-212. The Cook Political Report lists 21 House races as toss-ups, with Republicans defending 16.

Costs haven’t dropped

Robert Speel, an associate professor of political science at Penn State Behrend in Erie, pointed to Trump’s dismal approval ratings and the impact of the war in Iran on gas prices as among the major disadvantages facing the GOP heading into Election Day on Nov. 3.

“Trump’s popularity is down below 40% in pretty much every poll now, and even in the low 30s or high 20s in some polls, and the Iran war is not even popular with Republicans, which has led to higher gas prices and his tariffs have led to inflation,” Speel said.

“It seems, from some numbers, possibly job losses in the last year and a half, so the economy is not doing particularly well, and I … expect it to drag down the Republicans in November,” he added.

Just 33% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling his job as president, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Aug. 24. The result tied for the lowest approval rating the pollster found since Trump took office in 2017.

Just 31% of respondents expressed approval of U.S. military strikes against Iran, including 69% of Republicans.

Among registered voters, 36% said Democrats had a better plan or policy regarding the cost of living, compared with 28% choosing Republicans.

When the GOP secured a trifecta of the White House, Senate and House in 2024, voters gave the party homework to lower prices and do so right away, but Republicans failed that assignment, said Democratic campaign strategist Reed Adamson.

“Prices have gone up, and so, you’re going to see them try and wiggle out of that every time, but it comes up in so many different ways, whether it is anecdotes about cost of groceries or gas or just overall cost of living or even just consumer sentiment about the economy,” Adamson said.

“It is going to be really hard for them to wiggle out of it, and I think Democrats, for the most part, have been just sort of really disciplined in hammering that home,” he added.

Dems confident

The Democratic Party’s campaign apparatus for House races expressed confidence they will take back the House.

“Democrats are going to flip the House majority in November because we have the better message, better candidates, and strong momentum on our side,” Nebeyatt Betre, a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson, said in a statement shared with States Newsroom.

“All Republicans have to offer are higher prices families hate, unpopular rigged maps voters hate, and devastating health care cuts everybody hates,” Betre said. “Democratic candidates are winning over voters because they’re talking about their plans to lower costs, strengthen access to health care, and make Congress work for working people.”

GOP’s map, cash advantages

Meanwhile, the GOP’s campaign arm for House races sees several factors in their favor, including that progressive candidates have won Democratic primaries in some competitive races.

“House Republicans are running on a more favorable map with historic fundraising, stronger candidates, and a commonsense agenda, while Democrats are saddled with a deeply unpopular agenda and radical socialist nominees hijacking the must-win districts they need to take the majority,” Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement shared with States Newsroom.

Twenty-three Democrats are running in districts Trump won in 2024, including 21 where Trump garnered more than 50% of the vote, according to a June NRCC battleground memo.

The NRCC also holds a $13.7 million cash-on-hand advantage over the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as of mid-July.

And, despite low poll numbers for Republicans, their opponents have not sold voters on a clear alternative, Daniel Scarpinato, a Republican campaign strategist, said.

“Republicans face some headwinds, but Democrats actually have to say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do differently,’ and they haven’t really been able to articulate that,” Scarpinato said. “It’s really just been a pretty anti-Trump message, but they haven’t told people, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’”

He noted that in focus groups, swing voters are not “ecstatic about the Democratic Party.”

Turnout problem

Republicans are also facing a challenge in getting their voters to the polls, as their coalition has transitioned to include fewer college-educated and older people, and those groups historically turn out the most in midterms, according to Ryan Owens, a political science professor and director of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University.

Trump has pivoted the party more toward blue-collar voters and away from the more affluent and educated voters whose high turnout rates buoyed the party in past midterm election cycles.

Without Trump up for reelection, the party will likely struggle to activate the coalition that twice sent him to the White House, Owens said.

“You used to see Republicans do really well in midterm elections,” he said. “But now that they don’t rely so much on that college-educated, white vote, their coalition doesn’t turn out as much as it used to in midterms.

“Without having Trump on the ballot, without having a presidential election that generates that kind of enthusiasm to turn out, Republicans have been doing worse and worse during midterms,” he added.

Covey, of the Cook Political Report, said Republicans’ redistricting blitz and the number of pickup opportunities Republicans drew themselves across Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and other Southern states is the main reason they have any path to keeping their majority.

However, “there’s a lot of variance in that because the seats that were redistricted, many of them are still quite competitive, and so, there’s a world in which Democrats hold on to them this cycle, for sure,” she said.

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Shockwaves ripple through the GOP after voters flip on key issues

The official campaign for the US midterm elections usually begins after America celebrates Labor Day on September 7. But over the summer, the battle for votes has intensified between Donald Trump’s Republican party and a freshly emboldened Democratic party.

In November’s elections, all the seats in the House of Representatives will be contested, as will one-third of the Senate. Throughout the year, Republican and Democratic hopefuls have been engaged in the primary election process.

These are now nearing a conclusion. Primaries have now been held across the country for gubernatorial, Senate and House contests. Following the August 18 primaries, polling showed the Democrats with a six-point lead.

The Democratic party has also been buoyed by data from earlier in the month from a Reuters/Ipsos poll that revealed for the first time in nearly a decade that voters prefer the party’s approach to the economy. This could be a decisive factor come election day on November 3.

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a thinktank, has asserted that in America’s current bitterly divided political climate “where more congressional districts than ever before are considered ‘safe’ for one party or the other, real change plays out in congressional primaries”.

Results from the August 18 primaries in Florida, Alaska and Wyoming have underlined the current shifts in voting preferences among both Republican and Democratic supporters.

On the Democrat side, there appears to be a developing trend of candidates on the party’s left defeating centrist hopefuls. In Florida, democratic socialist Angie Nixon defeated her moderate Democrat opponent, Alex Vindman.

The result was striking for two reasons. First, the contrast in campaign spending by both candidates. Nixon raised US$975,000 (£716,000) compared to Vindman’s war chest of over US$16.3 million.

The other noteworthy point was Nixon’s robust position on Israel. She advocated stripping the country of US aid, something that is politically risky in a state that contains America’s third-largest Jewish population.

This was by no means uniform – other candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) lost out to more established Democratic candidates. But Nixon’s victory represented another progressive outsider advancing to November’s elections – something already witnessed in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan.

DSA figures have been able to tap into significant frustration among the Democratic voter base that has become increasingly vexed by cost-of-living issues as well as growing discontent towards their party establishment.

Trump ticket no longer golden

Democrats are now beginning to feel increasingly optimistic about their chances to take back control of the US Senate after November. This would require a net gain of four seats.

An emerging trend from recent Republican results suggests that the once hugely sought-after Trump endorsement is no longer the guarantee of victory it once was. The president’s first choice in Florida’s 19th congressional district, Catalina Lauf, lost out to Jim Schwartzel. Similarly, in Wyoming’s Republican primary for governor the sitting state senator Eric Barlow defeated the Trump-backed candidate Megan Degenfelder.

In South Carolina, Darline Graham – who replaced her brother Lindsay Graham as senator when he died in July – won a run-off primary with the strong backing of the president. But given the late Senator Graham’s prominent profile, she is perhaps best seen as a continuity candidate, winning on name recognition as much as on the Trump endorsement.

This apparent defiance against the 47th president among registered Republican voters seems to be increasingly common, with the president’s preferences in Iowa, Georgia and South Carolina’s gubernatorial races all losing.

Trump’s job approval ratings remain in negative territory. A recent RealClearPolitics polling average had the president’s approval rating at 39.2% with 58.4% of respondents saying they disapprove of his performance.

The war in Iran is having a daily impact on the lives of ordinary Americans through rising fuel prices. The survey also revealed that just three out of ten voters approved of Trump’s management of the conflict. This may explain why some Republican voters are prepared to reject the president’s endorsement.

Rural voters

Rural voters are emerging as a key demographic that appears to be turning away from Trump. Sharp rises in fuel and fertiliser costs are hitting grain producers particularly hard, while Trump’s tariff regime is hurting agricultural exports.

A recent Fox News analysis found that among rural voters, Trump’s net job approval fell from +20 in early 2025 to -14 in May 2026. A recent article by Brookings senior fellow, William A. Galston, pointed to the fact that Trump carried 64% of the rural vote to Kamala Harris’s 34% in 2024. He believes that in November, while Republican voters may not choose to cast their ballot for Democratic candidates, there’s a strong possibility more will choose not to vote at all.

There was further bad news for the Republicans in a Pew Research study from July which found that, despite Trump himself not being on the ballot, nearly twice as many voters – 42% – will use their ballot to vote against him as those who will use it to vote for him.

But all might not be lost just yet for the GOP. It may look as if the Democrats are on course to retake the House of Representatives – and potentially also the Senate – in November. But we have yet to discover the impact of significant redistricting by various states under the administration of both parties.

Redistricting is when a state redraws the boundaries of its electoral seats to better reflect the state’s demographics. This happens automatically every ten years. But a number of states have redrawn their boundaries since July 2025 outside this automatic process. Analysis shows that out of the ten states to have engaged in a voluntary redistricting process, the new electoral maps of eight favour Republicans.

So while Democrats have a clear polling edge and obvious momentum, the results of the midterms are still far from certain.The Conversation

Richard Hargy, Lecturer in International Studies and Politics, Ulster University; Queen's University Belfast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Democrats are weaponizing an everyday word to quietly reshape the midterms

If you have seen campaign ads for the midterm elections, you have likely noticed that a major theme this year is corruption.

New Hampshire congressman and Senate candidate Chris Pappas has framed his campaign around his anti-corruption efforts in Congress, claiming that his anti-corruption record includes the fact that he “doesn’t take a dime of corporate PAC money,” opposes congressional stock trading, and wants to ban companies from using AI to set prices based on Americans’ personal data.

A super PAC allied with Pappas’ prospective Republican opponent, John Sununu, has run ads calling Pappas corrupt, alleging that Pappas “serves on a House committee that oversees Uber, where his husband, a former lobbyist, serves in an executive policy role.”

This is one of many races where corruption has a prime role. On her DCinbox Substack, which tracks “how members of Congress communicate with constituents,” Lindsey Cormack shows that Democrats this year are talking about corruption six times as much as they did in 2022 and four times as much as Republicans have this year in their emails to constituents. This suggests that the corruption talk is a part of Democratic Party strategy.

Why?

One possibility might be that there is a lot of corruption happening. Yet a puzzling feature of these advertisements is that few of them mention President Donald Trump, despite plentiful allegations of corrupt acts by Trump and members of his administration.

Another might be that the public is particularly concerned about corruption. Research shows, however, that the public is always a little bit concerned about corruption, and that these worries often do not correspond with particular actions by politicians.

So what is going on, then?

The talk, it turns out, is not really about specific, identifiable corruption. It’s about delegitimizing your opponent.

Choice of those out of power

My recent book, “American Corruption Talk,” co-authored with Molly Brigid McGrath, analyzes the prevalence of what we call “corruption talk” by presidents and presidential candidates since the nation’s founding. We argue that corruption talk is different from talk about real corruption – many Americans identify things as being corrupt even when they do not meet the textbook definition of corruption.

In our book, we identify three types of corruption:

• Transactional corruption is inherent in particular acts – offering or accepting a bribe, for instance.

• Moral corruption is being a rotten person – someone who is corrupt is not trustworthy, even if we cannot identify anything specific that person has done wrong.

• Systemic corruption has to do with the government’s behavior itself. It is not a matter of bad people but bad institutions.

Corruption talk blurs the distinctions between these three distinct things.

In the book, we explore changes over time in how presidents, presidential candidates and party platforms discuss corruption.

We found that parties out of power talk much more about corruption than those who are in power. Corruption talk is popular among politicians who want to avoid taking strong ideological positions or tying themselves closely to their party leaders. They can use it as evidence of bipartisanship, as a way to say they are not career politicians, or to emphasize their competence and integrity.

Corruption is what political scientists call a valence issue – almost everyone thinks corruption is bad, but not everyone agrees about how much of it there is.

Corruption talk, it turns out, is useful for bringing together parties or candidates who want to avoid talking about divisive issues. It is also a way to delegitimize the opposition. If one’s opponents are corrupt, it doesn’t matter what they say. They’re the kind of people who would do corrupt things, even if they haven’t done them yet.

Democrats avoid division

The Democrats’ corruption talk of 2026 checks all of these boxes.

Democrats have internal divisions, from political ideology to policy on Israel, which they may wish to avoid talking about.

Talking about things Trump has done requires too much explanation – it’s hard to describe the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause in a 30-second ad. That clause bars the president from accepting “‘any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever’ from a foreign government unless Congress consents,” and Trump has been accused of violating it.

But talking about corruption in a moral or systemic sense – observing that the country is in decline, or that elites are out of touch – can be effective.

“To every Utahn tired of chaos and corruption, there’s a place for you on this campaign,” Ben McAdams, a former Democratic congressman from Utah and current candidate for the House, declared in a July 2026 Instagram post.

So talking about corruption is a way to talk about Trump and the Trump administration without mentioning them directly. Voters unhappy with Trump will assume corruption talk is an indictment of Trump, while Trump supporters may assume the corruption is elsewhere – after all, Trump won the 2016 election, in part, by promising to take on the corrupt establishment.

These distinctions – real corruption vs. corruption talk – go back at least to the country’s founding, if not beyond. Historically, corruption talk has stood in for other things.

For instance, the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when activists in both parties worked together to pursue reforms in government, economic policy and social policy, was the era in which we find that corruption talk was most prevalent in American politicians’ rhetoric. It was also a moment when America was almost as polarized and economically unequal as it is today, and many Americans saw this inequality as a symptom of corruption.

None of this is to deny that the U.S. currently has a president who has engaged in more overt acts of corruption than any other. Trump’s actions – from his family’s documented cryptocurrency profiteering to his appointment of a Cabinet full of conflicts of interest (such as stock ownership in companies regulated by their agencies, or a history of lobbying the very agencies they now run), to his alleged ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein – no doubt have catalyzed this discussion.

Yet it is perhaps fitting that the nation’s 250th anniversary has been characterized by a return to a classic American preoccupation: the traditional American pastime of corruption talk.The Conversation

Robert Boatright, Professor of Political Science, Clark University; Institute for Humane Studies

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A federal judge just trapped the Supreme Court in an ingenious loophole

The Supreme Court's recent willingness to allow President Donald Trump to implement his mail-in voting restrictions, even as it considers ultimately banning them, has left outside observers "angry and alarmed." The decision is consistent with the actions of a bench both Democrats and neutral outsiders agree has acted in a hyper-partisan manner. Yet a Thursday decision by federal district Judge Indira Talwani has used their own logic to stop a Democratic president as a justification for halting his Republican successor — if, that is, they will set aside their partisanship to rule consistently."

On Thursday evening, federal district Judge Indira Talwani issued a new order that temporarily blocks an effort by the Trump administration that appears designed to sabotage voting by mail in the upcoming midterm election," wrote Vox's Ian Millhiser on Sunday. "Talwani previously blocked an executive order that President Donald Trump issued in March, which ordered the US Postal Service (USPS) to impose a byzantine array of new regulations on voting by mail, but the Supreme Court reinstated the order on Monday."

Millhiser added, "Talwani’s new order sets up a new legal fight that is almost certain to return to the justices, and it is unclear whether this Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, will allow Trump to make sweeping and unilateral changes to how the United States conducts its elections so close to an actual Election Day. That said, while Talwani’s new order in League of Women Voters v. Trump is brief, it is well-crafted to persuade at least some members of the Court’s Republican majority to break with the leader of their political party."

To do this, Talwani cited the “major questions doctrine,” a concept that the Supreme Court's Republican majority invented in President Barack Obama's second term which it has only ever used against Biden. According to this construct, the executive branch is prohibited from making policy changes that are too sweeping or too aggressive, regardless of whether a federal statute authorizes them to do so.

"One common critique of this doctrine is that it appears nowhere in the Constitution or in any federal law," Millhiser wrote. "The Court first announced the doctrine in its 2014 opinion in Utility Air, which merely invoked it to criticize a hypothetical EPA regulation that never actually existed. The Court has also never handed down a majority opinion explaining where the justices’ new power to veto federal regulations comes from. Moreover, while some individual justices have attempted to do so, their explanations conflict with each other, and are often ridiculous. Barrett has argued, for example, that the major questions doctrine derives from a parable about a babysitter."

He continued, "Another criticism of the doctrine is that the Court has never applied it to a Republican administration — indeed, the Court has thus far only applied it to Biden. The doctrine, after its first appearance in 2014, laid dormant for the entire first Trump administration — only to spring back to life in order to block several of Biden’s attempts to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, while the major questions doctrine is hard to defend as a good faith effort to interpret the Constitution or any statute, the pragmatic case for allowing someone to rein in a too aggressive president has undoubtedly gotten stronger in the last two years. Trump is a walking advertisement for the idea that there should be limits on executive power. If the Court decided to apply its major questions doctrine to Trump, it’s unlikely that many Democrats would object to such a decision."

The doctrine has widely been regarded as "illegitimate" both because of its inconsistent application and because even a Republican judge, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, expressed open contempt for it when it was issued. Yet because Trump's mail-in voting rule would undeniably force the USPS and other institutions to scramble to effectively implement it mere weeks before Election Day, it "should be a very easy case — even for the Court’s Republicans," Millhiser concluded. "All they need to do to strike down Trump’s attack on voting by mail is apply the same rules to Trump that they previously applied to Biden."

When the decision was first announced, both conservatives and liberals joined in denouncing it.

"Ironically, if it does come to be in effect, the states best equipped to handle the USPS rule might be the all-mail states," Stephen Richer, legal fellow with the conservative Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. "That is, the administrative burden is comparatively simple for states that simply mail a ballot to every registered voter. Those states just need to keep sending full voter registration list to USPS."

He continued, "It will be much harder on the states that have lots of mail voters, but not all mail voters. I gotta imagine that the people who are the least excited about this are USPS employees. This is a massive new administrative lift, and people will blame them for any undelivered mail ballot."

NAACP President Derrick Johnson, meanwhile, said, "Let this ruling be a reminder that democracy is never, ever, guaranteed. Those in power know full well that they are unpopular and will lose in a free and fair election, and so they are trying to do everything they possibly can to make it difficult for you to vote. Trump’s order has nothing to do with election integrity. It has everything to do with maintaining power at all costs.”

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The real reason Trump won again —and why his power is waning

Even at 80 years old, she was still bringing Americans together. At 80, he continues to tear us apart.

She always stood for the underdog. He stands for the overlord. She was among the most generous people in American public life. He is the most self-centered. Hers was a voice of clarity, courage, and hope. His is the voice of cruelty, corruption, and incompetence.

If you line up the human species from most admirable to least, she’d be among the first; he’d be among the last.

Sadly, she is no longer with us. Sadly, he is.

This week he took to his Truth Social media to share an AI-generated illustration of himself walking arm in arm with her around the White House (see above). “I knew her a little bit,” he boasted on Glenn Beck’s radio show. “She really liked me, I will tell you!” at which Beck laughed out loud.

Most of the people I meet around this country are more like her than him. Americans are kind, friendly, empathic, optimistic. We want to protect the vulnerable and comfort the afflicted.

We’ve given refuge to those fleeing violence and persecution. We’ve aspired to equal opportunity for the disadvantaged, help for the destitute. We’ve given louder voices to those who’d otherwise not be heard. We’ve been a beacon of hope in the world.

These ideals are embedded in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Emma Lazarus’s poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty, FDR’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

We haven’t lived up to them, of course. There’s always been a dark side to America — a part of our soul that exemplifies him rather than her. We’ve been intolerant and bigoted. We’ve supported dictators. Earlier on we enslaved and engaged in genocide.

But most of us aren’t proud of that dark side. We’ve been proudest of our ideals.

So why did we elect him president again? Everyone has a view: Joe Biden should have exited the stage sooner, Democrats should have had a mini-primary, Kamala Harris wasn’t the best candidate, Trump cheated, and so on.

The deeper reason, I think, started several decades ago when those who had accumulated a great deal of power and wealth began to change America.

They destroyed the basic bargain at the heart of our economy: that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d do well and your children would do even better. Since the late 1970s, some $80 trillion has been siphoned from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the richest 1 percent.

Yet they got us to blame each other for our struggles rather than look upward and see where all the power and wealth had gone.

Trump gave voice to the scapegoating — blaming undocumented workers, the “deep state,” transgender people, Latinos, Black people, “communists,” Muslims, and Democrats. Now even Canada! All along, he’s been the mainstay of big money, the tribune of the wealthy and powerful.

But his power is now waning. Americans are seeing where he and the dark side have led us — to another unending war, to higher prices and lower wages, to cruel and brutal mass deportations.

We are finally looking upward and realizing where the power and wealth have gone.

We will have an election in just over nine weeks. It will give us a chance to correct some of this — not just constrain him but also start the long and difficult process of rebuilding the nation toward the ideals we’re most proud of, and which she exemplified.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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Trump has 'lost his fastball' as his relevance fades and fades: DC insiders

President Donald Trump's relevance is "declining with every passing moment," according to the D.C. insiders at Pod Save America, as his meager new effort at "trolling" shows just how much he has "lost his fastball" as a public figure.

During the latest edition of the podcast, former Obama administration officials Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer touched on Trump's "losing wars, raising prices and changing maps," noting further that his only public event on Thursday was for an executive order signing to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America." This came as a petulant response to crumbling trade talks with Canada, with Trump adding that he might also consider similar changes for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Unlike Trump's similar move early in his second term to try and rename the Gulf of Mexico, which drew much scrutiny and public outcry, this alleged change to Lake Ontario has largely failed to draw more than a shrug from most corners of the political world. When pressed to find a serious political implication from this move, which he summed as "dumb s——," Pfeiffer, Obama's former senior communications advisor, suggested that it showed how much Trump's abilities are declining so much that he is even bad at trolling his enemies now.

"Donald Trump's not even good at trolling anymore," Pfeiffer said. "I mean, we've said this before, where he's lost his fastball, but... you can almost feel the relevance just declining with every passing moment that people don't care, and he can't even... Like he does this for outrage. He can't do it."

He added further: "The second thing is that Democrats in the world have kind of figured out how to react to Trump. Like, if when this happened with the Gulf of America, imagine if this happened four years ago. Everyone would be screaming from the rooftops, you know, what a gigantic deal this is. You know, 'What an embarrassment for America. How dare he politicize the once independent board of geographic names and, you know, just like stacking it with cronies. Democracy is at risk. We can't even count on lake-naming anymore.'... Now no one cares."

Pfeiffer also noted that when Trump declared the Gulf of Mexico's name changed to the "Gulf of America" near the start of his second term, numerous news outlets and tech companies ultimately acquiesced to the change, with companies like Google and Apple changing the name of the body of water in their GPS apps. Now, as of Saturday evening, Lake Ontario remains unchanged on both Google Maps and Apple Maps, and the discussion around it potentially changing has been minimal to non-existent.

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Trump's Kennedy Center obsession has a problem courts are powerless to stop

President Donald Trump's obsession with adding his name to the Kennedy Center, and according to a new piece from The Atlantic, his crusade is being driven by something that courts are powerless to stop.

Trump's initial push to rename the Washington, D.C., institution to "The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts" was shot down in federal court earlier this year, forcing his name to be removed from the building's facade, though the change still remains covered by a tarp. In response, the center's board, packed with MAGA loyalists shortly after Trump's return to the White House, tried again, voting in favor of a motion to add the phrase, "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump," to the facade.

Writing for The Atlantic on Saturday, staff writer Janay Kingsberry argued that this factor, Trump's board of loyalists, is bound to keep this situation going perpetually, as it "keeps making decisions that drag out the ordeal."

"A judge can restrain the board but has no power to remake it," Kingsberry explained. "Congress can remake it, but only through legislative action, which Trump can veto. And meanwhile, his board remains in place—able to make new decisions that invite new challenges that send the parties back to the same judge."

John Harrison, a law professor at the University of Virginia, explained to Kingsberry that in the Kennedy Center situation, "if the problem is a governance problem, there is not much that a court can do." He also described the board as something of a "black box," as far as a court is concerned.

"A judge may issue orders to the people responsible for the entity and enforce those orders, but he generally will not reach inside that structure to prescribe how its decisions should be made when those procedures are established by statute," Kingsberry added. "That leaves two options for lawmakers, he said. First, Congress could change the Kennedy Center’s governance structure. Alternatively, it could leave the board intact but alter the law governing what the board is permitted to do—for instance, by making the rules surrounding the Kennedy Center’s name more explicit.

She continued: "Any provisions affecting the Kennedy Center could conceivably hitch a ride in a larger legislative package rather than come to the floor as a stand-alone measure, Harrison said, but 'it would have to be in a bill. It would have to be done by an act of Congress,' which, for now, seems unlikely."

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