pentagon leak

Trump is powerless to stop the one thing killing him at the ballot box

If you think your energy costs are high now, the situation may be about to get a whole lot worse.

With traffic in the Strait of Hormuz – normally the primary route for oil leaving the Middle East – hovering below 15% of prewar levels, oil prices have increased from US$65 a barrel before the conflict in Iran began in February 2026 to more than $100 a barrel in mid-September.

When the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran, analysts feared prices would soon reach $150 or even $200 a barrel. That hasn’t happened yet. But seven months into the conflict, with no clear end in sight, the global oil market has now largely exhausted the safety measures that exist to keep a lid on petroleum prices.

As researchers who study the relationship between energy and national security, we have been following these dynamics throughout the conflict, and the oil market is now showing signs that significant price hikes – and perhaps even shortages – may be on the way.

The squeeze tightens

Some oil has been able to make it out of the Persian Gulf despite the closure of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia increased output via its East-West pipeline, which runs from Abqaiq on the Persian Gulf overland to Yanbu on the coast of the Red Sea. At full capacity, that pipeline can carry as much as 7 million barrels per day, although only about 4 million to 5 million barrels per day are typically exported.

But attacks on the pipeline in mid-September that Saudi Arabia blames on Iran-backed militias based in Iraq forced the Saudis to temporarily halt oil shipments through that pipeline. The pipeline has now restarted operations at very low volumes, but it will likely take at least six to eight weeks to regain full capacity. Even this short cessation has tightened already constrained oil markets, and the threat of further Houthi attacks on Red Sea oil exports will only add to inflationary pressures.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Ukrainian drone attacks have damaged refineries, reducing Russian production of diesel fuel and prompting the country to ban exports of it. That has removed another 3% of the global daily supply of diesel, an important fuel for trucking and shipping. When diesel costs go up, the result is inflation in the cost of goods across the global economy.

Feeling the pinch

In the U.S., 47 states experienced record-high diesel prices on Sept. 22, with the national average reaching $6.52 per gallon.

The high prices prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to ban diesel exports, a move analysts suggest would make matters worse by accentuating global supply shortages and driving world prices upward.

Beyond diesel, motor oil prices have quadrupled, and supply shortages are starting to take hold. For instance, Costco has almost doubled its prices for motor oil and has limited the amount customers can buy.

The upshot from all this is that Americans are spending a lot more on fuel in 2026 as compared to 2025. Between March 1 and late September, Americans spent an additional $72 billion on gasoline compared to the same period a year ago, as well as $45 billion more on diesel. That’s $117 billion in additional fuel costs, above and beyond the costs of the war itself, which the Pentagon estimated at $45 billion as of early September.

These shocks are even more acute outside the United States, which is the world’s largest energy producer. South and Southeast Asian countries, which were more reliant on imports from the Persian Gulf than the United States, were hit hard soon after the war broke out. Some of them have had to ration fuel, while others enacted emergency measures like shortening the work or school week to reduce fuel use.

These challenges are now hitting Europe hard as well. On Sept. 20, some 15% of French service stations had reportedly run out of either diesel or gas.

Limited tools left

The international community has already taken most of the measures available to curb oil demand and boost its supply. Those moves have reduced the scale of oil price increases, but they did not prevent them entirely. Now, the toolbox is largely empty, leaving prices on the brink of spiking again.

In March 2026, a coordinated effort among 32 countries released more than 400 million barrels of oil into the global market from those countries’ strategic reserves. Those stockpiles are now substantially depleted, and it is not clear how much additional oil that countries will be willing or even able to release as the war continues.

Since the war began, the United States alone has released 130 million barrels, leaving its reserves at a 40-year low. The U.S. may not be able to release much more without compromising the structural integrity of the salt caverns where the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is stored.

The role of China

China has played the largest role in containing global oil prices to date by releasing official reserves as well as what now seem to be massive additional reserves not previously disclosed to the public. The country reduced its crude oil imports by nearly 50% between February and June 2026.

The increased electrification of the Chinese economy played a key role in reducing Chinese demand for oil during this period. More than 60% of new passenger car sales in China are electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids, and 30% of its heavy truck sales are now electric.

Overall, China’s electrification of its transport sector allowed it to reduce oil consumption by 1.35 million barrels per day in the first half of 2026.

Other countries are looking to China for help as well. The country’s international sales of electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels have skyrocketed, as other countries seek to insulate themselves from oil market shocks.

Less encouragingly when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, China has used more coal to offset oil demand and as an alternative means of petrochemical production as well.

Of perhaps more immediate concern, China’s oil demand is now starting to creep up again, with crude imports rising 6.2% in August 2026 as compared with the previous month. Even if its imports don’t reach prewar levels any time soon, increased Chinese demand, coupled with a tighter oil market, may result in additional price hikes over the next few weeks.

China still has about four to six months of stockpiles, including commercial and strategic reserves, but Beijing may soon seek to gradually restock its inventories, although the Chinese may postpone these purchases if prices continue to soar.

A look ahead

Sustained conflict in Iran – itself a major oil producer – continued disruptions of oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran-linked militias’ disruptions to shipping in the Red Sea could mean the reemergence of the nightmare scenarios analysts envisioned when the fighting began.

It’s not clear if that would translate into simply much higher prices at the pump or turn into 1970s-style shortages, where there’s not enough fuel available at any price and lines stretch around the block at gas stations.

With the 2026 midterm elections looming, the White House will want to avoid that scenario at all costs. But the Trump administration has already released large amounts from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and has rejected policies that would have reduced oil demand, such as stricter fuel economy standards or incentives for electric vehicle adoption.

At this point, Trump has relatively few options available to blunt new price shocks, the effects of which may be visible not just at the pump but also at the ballot box.The Conversation

Joshua Busby, Professor of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin and Greg Pollock, Adjunct Professor, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

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

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'Like the guy screaming by the freeway': Experts aren't buying Trump’s power

"Treat the president the same as the guy screaming by the freeway exit."

When Justin Levitt uttered that sentence in our interview, I felt a mixture of fear and relief. The fear stems from the fact that, unlike the guy screaming by the freeway exit, President Donald Trump has immense power. With that power, Trump has terrorized immigrants, persecuted transgender people, laid off thousands of hard-working federal employees, gutted the nation's once-superior scientific establishment, poisoned our natural environment and destroyed our longstanding international relationships. While doing these things, he has transformed the Republican Party into a political cult of personality, one in which members are literally told to pledge allegiance to him, and enriched himself to the tune of roughly $2 billion.

Yet the "guy screaming by the freeway exit" analogy can also inspire relief. Levitt — a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden as, respectively, Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Senior Policy Advisor for Democracy and Voting Rights — knows what he is talking about when it comes to the law. Despite ongoing fears that Trump will rig the 2026 midterm elections so that Republicans retain control of Congress, and he can continue doing whatever he wants with minimal accountability, Levitt insists that Trump has about as much power to do this as the aforementioned freeway exit rager.

In the following conversation, I broke down five of the most widely discussed possibilities in terms of Trump rigging the 2026 midterm elections, and got Levitt's thoughts on each of them.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity, context and length.


Trump is wizened, not a wizard.

ROZSA: My foremost concern as a journalist who has been covering the 2026 midterms since the beginning is that Trump will do something drastic to try to steal them. Five possibilities come to mind. One, that he will purge people from the rolls. Two, that he will seize ballot boxes before, during or after the election process has played out. Three, that he will use law enforcement to try to intimidate people who are voting. Four, that he will file frivolous lawsuits in order to overturn votes, and use MAGA supporters who are embedded in the system to facilitate that. And five, that if all of those other efforts fail, he will simply have Congress try to reject the results should they empower a Democratic-run legislature. I apologize for being so long-winded, but I wanted to be thorough. What are your thoughts about my concerns?

LEVITT: None of them will work. Those five things, and 18 others, all sort of fall down at the point of possibility. You're absolutely right that he will try something: one, maybe several of those, or other things. But none of those things will succeed. And I can walk you through each and every one of them and point you to why they won't succeed.

ROZSA: Please do.

LEVITT: The short version is he is trying to project power that he does not have. He would love the American public to believe that he actually has operational control of forces able to execute on any of those five things or others, but he doesn't. He's not in charge of the systems that govern the election process. As much as he thinks he is, he's not. And so I have firmly believed for a while that the single biggest risk to the '26 elections is that the American public falls for the marketing stunt and bestows magical wizard powers on a tired old man. That we do it to ourselves. That we get so spun up and freaked out thinking that he's got a magic ring that lets him do whatever he wishes that we decide to stay home, or we decide to trim our own sails, because we imbue him with an aura of invincibility that he has not earned and does not have.

So I'm convinced the biggest risk — and I don't think it's actually going to happen; I think we're smarter than this — but I think the biggest risk is that we do it to ourselves, pretending he's got power he doesn't have because he desperately wants to convince us that he's got this power.


Can Trump seize ballot boxes?

ROZSA: You said you would go through each of those examples one by one. I'm going to repeat them just to jog your memory. The first is seizing ballot boxes before, during or after the election by claiming a national emergency of some kind.

LEVITT: I thought the first was purging, but we can do them in whatever order you want. So, seizing ballot boxes. Anybody who shows up in a windbreaker to seize ballot boxes is going to have to have a piece of paper from a federal judge in that district to give that windbreaker any meaning. Election officials aren't going to open the door to somebody who just shows up and says, "I'm here to take the ballot boxes, please." They're going to have to actually show a warrant. And I think in this respect, the president and his activists did the whole country a huge favor by seizing old materials — not current ones, not active ones, not new ones — in Fulton County, and seizing old materials in Riverside County. I think those warrants actually caught the judges a little bit by surprise.

If you are a federal judge reviewing warrants, or a state-court judge reviewing warrants, you review hundreds of warrants a week. They're sort of standard issue. You look at the thing quickly to see if there's probable cause, and if there is, you sign off and you're done. And most of the time the answer is yes.

I don't think there's a judge in the country who hasn't at least heard of the warrants in Fulton and the warrants in Riverside and the profound controversy they occasioned. And even if you believe there are some judges who would go along with it, you don't have those judges in the districts where seizing the ballot boxes is going to matter. Do you want to go seize a ballot box in the heart of ruby-red Trump country? Go for it. But the tactic you've described only accomplishes the goal in areas that have a lot of Democratic voters. Those are the same areas that tend to have judges who are a little less inclined to automatically do whatever it is the president wants.

ROZSA: I have to interject here, because Peter Ticktin, the attorney who, despite being a hack, is nevertheless influential with Trump, said to The Atlantic recently, "Our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are." He was referring to protesters who might try to stop him from using sheer brute force to seize ballot boxes. What do you say to that?

LEVITT: I'd say two things. One, Peter Ticktin lives in a world of make-believe. Two, now you're not talking about seizing ballot boxes. If you're talking about armed forces, you're talking about rolling out the Army.

ROZSA: To seize ballot boxes.

LEVITT: That's what Peter Ticktin would like to do. He would like to mobilize the 101st Airborne to occupy New York City to seize ballot boxes. That's not going to happen, for a number of different reasons. One, it's wildly illegal. Two, the military knows that. Three, the military does not like being deployed on domestic soil. That is not what soldiers signed up for. Four, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has already said we're not going anywhere near the polling places, because he knows as well as anybody that it is in his interest to rule out nonsense like Ticktin's immediately.

And five: No, they're not. What you're describing is a military coup, right? Let's not pretend that it's legal in any way. What you're describing is the military occupying America. And he's just wrong about the number of military personnel that would require. There are several million members of the U.S. military, and to effectuate a military coup, they'd need to occupy about 350 million Americans. That ratio, in addition to the geography, in addition to the fact that the members of the military don't want it — even if this is Peter Ticktin's sick fantasy, it's not a fantasy that the military's going to go along with.

ROZSA: I must interject, because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has purged roughly 80 generals so far and replaced them with loyalists.

LEVITT: Sure. How many sergeants, when you tell them we're occupying Brooklyn or Chicago or Los Angeles, are going to willingly say yes? I live in Los Angeles. We had the benefit of a National Guard deployment — which is a supplemental force, by the way, not the main force — just over a year ago. There was a meme going around at the time conveying the level of civil unrest occasioned by this deployment. At the top of this thermometer scale was the Rodney King uprising. Slightly farther down, as a measure of civil unrest, was the attempt to get a parking spot at the Trader Joe's in Silver Lake. Slightly farther down from that was the attempt to get out of the Hollywood Bowl after a concert. Slightly farther down from that was Christmas shopping at the Glendale Galleria. And significantly farther down from that was the National Guard deployment. When they were here, they occupied two blocks of downtown, and 99.9 percent of Angelenos did not notice they were there. They showed up on TV, sure. But the sheer geography of the country is very, very big, and the sheer number of people it would take for this to work is logistically unfathomable.

If we're not even talking about legality — if you're talking about brute force — I completely understand that this is Ticktin's fantasy, but I've got to point out, it is a fantasy.


Can Trump purge voters?

ROZSA: Now let's talk about purging voters. My concern is that the Supreme Court recently provided the Homeland Security Department with the authorization to purge voters it claims are noncitizens, even though there are many false positives.

LEVITT: Nope, nope, nope. I was with you right up until you said it granted the Homeland Security Department the authority to purge, and it did not. It granted the Homeland Security Department the authority to use a wildly flawed list to identify potential noncitizens. There are only two types of entities with the authority to purge voters from registration rolls: state election officials and local election officials.

ROZSA: So what can the Homeland Security Department do?

LEVITT: They can deliver lists of hot garbage to local election officials and try to convince those people to purge people from the rolls. They can also pursue enforcement, although they're bad at that. They're not getting bad at it; they're bad at it, and it's in no way systematic. I don't believe anyone is using a list like this. So their capacity to convince local officials to use the garbage they're offering is minimal, because nobody believes their lists are worthwhile. And the reason nobody believes their lists are worthwhile is that they're not worthwhile.

In Nevada, they went to state and local officials, and — I've seen the tape — it has the overwhelming vibe of, "We're going to try very hard to be nice to you, but you've got to show us what you're talking about." And with immense patience, the officials in Nevada asked Homeland Security about the list they had found of purportedly 15,903 alleged noncitizens. The officials said, "Okay, well, you say you found a number. Can you give us the data you used to get there, or walk us through your process, or help us understand how you came to this list?"

And Homeland Security basically said, "Well, that's the starting number. We haven't actually figured this out yet." It later turned out they had found 185 potential noncitizens from that list of 15,000 that they were rock-solid sure about. And I think it was just reported last week that 185 out of 185 were citizens. So their list went from 15,903 to 185 to zero — which, frankly, the state and local officials already knew, because the lists DHS is using are hot garbage. So if someone came to you and said, "I have a steaming bag of poop that I'm leaving on your front door. Would you like to bring it inside the house?" Would you say yes?

ROZSA: May I counter that with something I heard from a different expert?

LEVITT: Of course.

ROZSA: Pooja Chaudhuri, senior counsel/deputy legal director at Democracy Defenders Fund. Do you know her?

LEVITT: Yeah.

ROZSA: She told me the following in June, and I'm going to read you the full quote: "I used to staff the Election Protection Coalition when I worked as a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers' Committee, and we actually saw voters going to the polls and being told by the poll worker, ‘You're not registered to vote,’ or ‘You're not in the poll book,’ and it's too late by the time you find out on Election Day to register to vote in many states. Here, a voter may very well be purged and find out too late — and then they will be disenfranchised." What are your thoughts on that?

LEVITT: Sure, that happens. There are mistakes, unfortunately, in the list-cleaning process. There are some times that people are purged. But that's not the federal government doing the purging. That's state and local officials doing the purging.

ROZSA: State and local officials acting at Trump's behest, though.

LEVITT: In which jurisdictions? You think Nevada officials aren't going to go there, but California officials will? That Illinois officials will? That New York officials will? There are some problems in Texas, I grant you that. I don't think the problems are because of the Department of Homeland Security; I think they're different problems.

And there are absolutely measures that voters can and should take to make sure that they're registered, and registered in the right place. List maintenance is a process, and it's never perfect. The best time for voters to check to make sure they're registered correctly is literally right now, in the window after it's no longer legal to do systematic purges, which is 90 days before an election, but before the registration deadline, which by federal law can be no earlier than 30 days before the election. And in many states, it's much shorter than 30 days. So for anybody who's reading: The right time to go check your registration — and the vast majority of states make this available online — is literally right now. Anybody who doesn't want to be taken by surprise, like Pooja said, anybody who doesn't want to have to worry about a provisional ballot: The easiest solution in the world is to go check your registration right now and make sure you're registered in the right place.

But nothing that Pooja said indicates that DHS has any capacity or authority either to do the work themselves or to persuade anybody else. I mean, if local officials want to disenfranchise their own citizens, there are ways. But most of them don't.

Pew has done a survey every two years since at least 2018, and probably before then, where 90 to 92 percent of Americans say they trust that their local elections will be free, fair, and well run — because they will be. Ninety to 92 percent is an enormous amount of trust in institutions. You don't see those kinds of numbers anywhere else. And that's across party lines, and it's very consistent over time.

And that, I think, is worth remembering: Most local election officials are actually serving their constituencies, and their constituents know it. Ninety-two percent, across party lines, across time. That is a stunning level of trust in the process, and a confidence rating that very few institutions enjoy.


Can Trump send law enforcement to the polls?

ROZSA: The next question is about Trump sending law enforcement, such as ICE agents or local police, or his own radicalized supporters, to the polls. The Justice Department says that it's sending monitors to observe. Could that be used to intimidate people or in any other way hinder the voting process?

LEVITT: Not the monitors. A thousand monitors is a drop in the bucket. It's the right force if you want to actually monitor elections for wrongdoing, for federal problems. It'll probably be used in the aftermath of the election when Trump claims there was something going on. It's like an empty manila folder that he can just wave around as a prop. But a thousand people is nowhere near enough to actually disrupt the elections. And those monitors can be thrown out of the polls by locals if they cause any disturbance at all.

ICE is more serious, in part because ICE has been operating relatively lawlessly. The first thing to know is that there have been restrictions since the Civil War on sending armed individuals to the polls, and many states echo those prohibitions. Your local law enforcement can arrest a federal agent who is armed and at the polls.

I actually believe that this one will happen, but on a tiny scale, because again, the logistics are the thing that make it a problem. There just aren't enough guys. There just aren't enough ICE officers. There are tens of thousands of polling places in most states and hundreds of thousands of polling places across the country, and they're spread apart in a way that would make it extremely logistically difficult to even have one person at each for intimidation purposes.

So here's what I think is going to happen. I think they will pick one polling place somewhere, a suburban polling place, send 10 to 20 people, film it, and try to make Americans believe, when that clip goes viral, that it's happening everywhere. Trump got his start in marketing. He's a marketing guy. He's a communications guy. And so if he can sell the notion that this is happening without it actually happening, he's far happier. Sending 20 people to one polling place, that's logistically possible. But that also means that 99.999 percent of Americans won't ever run into this when they actually go to the polls. So I think you're going to be sold the image of chaos, but if you actually step outside your door, you're not going to see it, because it's not going to be there.


Can Trump steal the election through frivolous lawsuits?

ROZSA: My next question is about Trump using frivolous litigation to try to steal elections. For that one, I want to quote George F. Will. When describing the efforts Trump made to commit a coup after the 2020 election, he noted that there were multiple attempts at litigating, and I'm going to read the statistics he quoted: "Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists). They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result. Trump’s batting average? .016."

Now, some would say this is good news because it shows that the courts stopped him. I would say it's ominous because he clearly tried. Would you say that he is likely to try again to pursue this with frivolous litigation?

LEVITT: Sure. Why wouldn't he? It's one of the things he does. I would say it is even more unlikely now that any of it works. The thing about litigation: Filing a lawsuit without provable facts showing a constitutional or statutory violation is just a tweet with a filing fee. If you're going to ask me, is he going to lie on Truth Social about whether he won the elections? My answer is 100 percent yes, of course he will. But that doesn't translate to actual results being different.

I agree with Mr. Will's stats, and for me, the most important one is the one win that didn't matter. I think there are actually two. I think his allies won on whether his observers could stand a foot closer to watch the absentee ballots than they had been allowed to stand before. But the thing about litigation is it's not magic. It doesn't magic away millions of votes. It can't. Law is a dispute-resolution system, and if there's actually no dispute, then there's nothing for law to do.

So I think the courts — particularly trial and appellate courts — have been behaving remarkably well over the last two years, hands down. They've been examining actual law and actual facts. I haven't by any stretch agreed with all of their rulings, but I have actually, at the trial and appellate level, agreed with most of them. And that includes judges appointed by Donald J. Trump, who have not given the light of day to frivolous cases and have taken seriously real claims with real, provable facts.

The Supreme Court has not been that well behaved, but we've just seen three instances in the last two weeks where even they aren't just in the tank for Donald Trump. Even this radically conservative Supreme Court — and I am not a fan of the way they've been behaving — is not willing to simply rule on ridiculousness for Donald Trump's benefit. You saw it with the gerrymander in Missouri. You saw it with the Postal Service. You'll see it again.

So yeah, there is no doubt there will be frivolous litigation. Of course there will. But nobody should change an ounce of their behavior because of that. It's going to keep the lawyers busy, but voters don't have to worry about an election being stolen, because you can't do it that way. It's the equivalent of writing "I hereby steal the election" on a McDonald's Happy Meal placemat. If I did that and held it aloft, nobody would be terrified that the election would be stolen. They'd look at me as if I were crazy, because that would be crazy.


Can Trump convince Congress to not certify the election results?

ROZSA: So now I want to ask about the possibility that on January 3, if Democrats are about to be certified as taking over one or both houses of Congress, Trump will simply convince Speaker Johnson or Leader Thune to reject those results.

LEVITT: The best article I saw on this — and I've been following this one closely, too — is an article on Lawfare that walks through the exact process of what this would take. And it turns out that the key moment isn't anything that Mike Johnson has a part in. The key moment is who's put on the roll of potential House members when, at noon, the House dissolves as a body. At 12:01, there is no House. There is no Speaker Johnson. He's just a dude.

The clerk of the House is the person who controls the roll. The clerk of the House has a nondiscretionary, very clear statutory duty to recognize the potential members who show up with certificates of election from their states, the things that the state officials have certified. And Speaker Johnson doesn't have a thing to say about that roll, because there is no Speaker Johnson at that moment. The House doesn't exist at that moment. And so you bet there are members of the House who are exceedingly aware of the possibility for nonsense.

I'll say, remember, for the mischief to happen — because this would all have to happen before the new House comes in — it's the existing House and the existing Senate that would have to break democracy. And that would be a different kind of coup, not a military coup. There are a number of sitting members of the House and sitting members of the Senate who are not particularly fans of Donald Trump, including Republicans, including Republicans the president campaigned against, who I don't think are inclined to just decide that we don't have a democracy anymore.

They have not been doing their jobs as members of Congress, I think, on affirmative legislation over the last two years, and for some, a whole lot longer. But that's different from saying, "The California secretary of state certified that you won the election, and I'm just going to refuse to acknowledge that certificate." It's important to count noses on this, and there isn't a majority of the House or a majority of the Senate willing to do that. If you doubt me, ask why the SAVE America Act isn't law yet.


Trump will lose his mind with rage if Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress.

ROZSA: I'm going to quote Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist who used to teach at Yale University and who warned me a few days before the 2020 presidential election that if Trump lost, he would never be able to accept it, for psychological reasons. I'm going to read you her deconstruction of his psychology and then ask you, A, whether you agree with it, and B, if you do, whether Americans should be alarmed that a president with this perspective will do anything it takes to not lose the midterms. Here's what she said:

"Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable. Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality — and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him. It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death."

Do you agree with her?

LEVITT: I am not a psychologist, so I cannot agree or disagree with her psychological diagnosis. I can say he sure shows signs of being disturbed, and he sure shows signs of not being trustworthy. I don't think he's fit for office. I don't think he's ever been fit for office. And he is obviously obsessed with the 2020 elections. You don't need to be a psychologist to see that. You just need to actually listen to him for a heartbeat.

ROZSA: So her prediction was borne out, at least in that respect.

LEVITT: He is obsessed with the 2020 elections. Whether that's because of a mental health break or some other feature, I do not know. I'm going to leave that to the psychological experts. But I'm going to tell you that there's not a word we've been discussing today that requires you to like or trust Donald Trump, because everything we've been talking about today has to do with whether he has the power to steal the 2026 elections. Not the desire, not the motivation, not the psychological twist that it would take, but the capacity. And I am firmly convinced that the only way the 2026 elections don't reflect the will of the people is if we do it to ourselves — if we fantasize a world in which this deeply flawed, wildly unpopular individual is somehow magically all-powerful, such that he can make his id manifest in areas he does not control.

He's just not in charge here. Will he rant and rage and claim and say things? Sure, yes. But I've got a guy right by the exit on the freeway where I live who does the same thing, and I'm not terrified that that guy's going to steal the 2026 elections. I'm telling you, as weird as it may seem, treat the president the same as the guy screaming by the freeway exit.

He's got a lot of operational control in a lot of different circumstances, and we're not used to a president making wild claims about operational control that he doesn't have, because in so many other ways, he does have operational control. He's got operational control over tariffs. He's got operational control over deployments overseas. He's got operational control over a lot of different things. And in those categories, the primary question is: Is he using that control lawfully? And the answer, unfortunately, is many, many, many times no. Here, he doesn't have operational control. The people who are actually running the elections are people who don't report to him and don't have to listen to him.


Is Trump America's Hitler?

ROZSA: That's good to know. I'm going to ask one last question, just because of what you said. A few weeks before the 2024 election, I wrote an article in which I interviewed scholars who compared Trump's rhetoric and his philosophy toward democracy to the ideas of Adolf Hitler. And then-campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote a response to me saying, quote, "It's been less than 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life, and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media." Do you think Trump's behavior, or at least his desires, are Hitler-esque, regardless of your optimism about his inability to execute those desires?

LEVITT: I don't know that the comparison is truthful, honestly. He's got some profoundly un-American desires. And in other arenas beyond the election results, he's got some ability to make those come true. In the election arena, he just doesn't have that ability. And that's, I think, all the information I need. I don't understand the value of comparing him to other deeply flawed leaders of peoples.

ROZSA: The value is in raising the alarm.

LEVITT: Yeah, but if you've been listening to anything I've been saying, raising the alarm to make him a supervillain is demotivating.

ROZSA: But not raising the alarm can make one complacent.

LEVITT: I don't know that what we've seen from voters this cycle has anything to do with complacency, right? He doesn't have to be a supervillain for voters to decide that they [hate] what he's doing to the country. And in primary after primary, in special election after special election, voters are deciding that they hate what he's doing to the country. He is, I think this is right, the least popular president at this point in his second term ever. The one exception may be Nixon, and that's only because I can't remember exactly when Nixon resigned.

ROZSA: It was in early August of 1974, so by this point in his second term, Nixon was out of office.

LEVITT: Okay. So second place so far, but dropping like a rock. And Nixon did not enjoy a supportive Congress in the way that this president has. I don't see complacency in a popularity rating that is the second-worst ever [...]. I think it's right for Americans to evaluate who they want to have in charge. It is absolutely right for Americans to understand that their preferences will matter, right? That their votes, whoever they're going to cast them for, are actually going to be counted as they intend in the coming elections. I think turning the president into Voldemort has the effect of scaring people, unnecessarily and unrealistically, into believing that he has the power to affect how the elections translate people's preferences.

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C-SPAN caller 'John Barron' goes off on 'slippery Scaramucci' in brief rant

President Donald Trump would use the pseudonym "John Barron" to plant favorable stories about himself in the press, so it was eyebrow-raising when a self-described Florida Republican with that name called C-SPAN on Monday to boost pro-Trump talking points.

"A caller who introduced himself as 'John Barron' briefly phoned in to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal program on Monday morning, boasting about the Iran war and jabbing at former communications chief Anthony Scaramucci before getting cut off," reported Mediaite's Tom Durante on Monday. "The caller, using Donald Trump’s old alias when he planted stories in the New York tabloids decades ago, called in to Washington Journal host Jasmine Wright just before 9 a.m."

Durante continued that the caller, who said they were in Tampa, told Wright, "Yes, I would like to say that the war in Iran has been a complete and utter victory for us. This is John Barron. You have slippery Scaramucci lying about the prices –"

At that point, Wright ended the call.

Speaking to AlterNet earlier in September, Scaramucci argued that Trump's ultimate goal as president is to make as much money as possible.

"I think his endgame is to see if he can make another $10 to $20 billion for himself and then pardon himself and his family members," Scaramucci told AlterNet. "I think that's his endgame. I don't think he has a policy endgame. I don't think he cares a wick about any person that voted for him or even anybody in America. He certainly would like to leave some monuments to himself in Washington."

He added, "I don't think he'll be successful in knocking down the Kennedy Center. He'll certainly be successful at building that ballroom. It'll remain indeterminate about the Trump arc, the triumph. But Trump wants to name things after himself, he wants to make money, and he wants attention. So look to see those people restored to the White House, Politico, CNN. He'll have to get them restored because they cut his air supply off. Even though he supposedly hates the journalists, he wants them there so he can get eyeballs and attention."

Scaramucci concluded, "But that's it. He doesn't have a policy endgame. He doesn't care about any of that stuff."

Later in that same interview, Scaramucci made it clear that he believes Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy.

"He is trying to corrupt the electoral process here, but I think he's going to be unsuccessful at doing it, primarily because it's incredibly decentralized," Scaramucci told AlterNet. "Moreover, General Caine said he's not putting military at any of the poll sites. Now, they could intimidate people at the polls, but you're not going to have the SAVE America Act." He went on to characterize that proposed bill as sexist, explaining that "they want people that have switched their names due to their marriages not to be able to vote, because most of those people don't vote for Republicans."

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Donald Trump is the weakest strongman ever

Yes, the White House is calling them "public-service announcements." They are not. A public-service announcement promotes policy, like anti-drunk driving laws. What the president is doing is using tax dollars to air commercials created for his 2024 presidential campaign. With them, Donald Trump hopes to move voters against the Democrats in advance of the midterms. They are illegal. They use public money for partisan gain.

That said, the president's ads may end up serving the public in unintended ways. First, as I said, they are illegal. Anyone can see that. Second, they remind everyone Trump is the president, even though he won't be on the ballot in November. (His net approval on the economy among indie voters is 99 points underwater, according to CNN.) Third, and most of all, they remind everyone of promises he made to get reelected and promises he broke.

For instance, Trump says in one ad:

"With you at my side, we will demolish the ‘deep state.’ We will expel the war mongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists; we will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all."

Let's see:

  1. Trump covered up the Epstein files. On the right, that's "the deep state."
  2. Trump attacked Iran, at Israel's behest. On the right, that's "globalist."
  3. Trump honors communists like China's Xi and acts kinda communist himself: taking equity stakes in corporations, imposing illegal tariffs, undermining private enterprise.
  4. Trump embodies "the sick political class." He has made over 28,000 stock trades using inside information to make hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and his family.
  5. Trump has bullied and censored media – eg, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel – and attempted to replace legit news with government propaganda. (It was called Trump TV, but no one watched.) The claim to "rout the fake news media" is undermined by the fact that Trump is using tax money to pay for TV ads for a campaign that does not exist.

If the president were surrounded by smart people who had the guts to talk to him truthfully, he might reconsider the wisdom of using tax dollars to buy air time for an old ad whose message is, more or less, HERE'S WHY YOU'RE MAD AT ME AND MY PARTY. Trump is not surrounded by smart people with guts, but instead bootlicking pricks who are going to see the scam through to the end. With the price of gas and diesel burning up the economy, especially the agricultural economy, the White House deputy chief of staff nevertheless thought it would be productive to post this video over the weekend. (It appears to be AI.)

But Trump does not need an illegal ad to remind us that he does not believe a word he says. That's accomplished by his actions since returning to office, most recently his decision to honor Xi Jinping, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, with a lavish state dinner.

Remember that, for Trump, China has long been a scapegoat. He blamed "the China virus" for the pandemic. (Wuhan province is the source of the "lab leak" conspiracy theory.) A million died not because of Trump's rank incompetence, but because China "weaponized" the covid.

The president has blamed China for cheating on trade. This allegation is the load-bearing pillar on which is based the idea of reorganizing the economy to be "America First." In reality, however, he has accomplished little except adding to inflationary forces, like the Iran War, that are driving up the cost of everything. Trump's illegal tariffs are now costing workaday Americans about $231 billion a year, or as much as $2,500 per household, according to an assessment by the Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee.

In July, during a prime-time speech, Trump blamed China for the fact that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Trump called it "the largest compromise of election data in history." Because of China's "sinister election meddling," Trump called for the passage of the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizens to vote, above and beyond what's already required. Trump threatened states with the loss of counter-terrorism funding if they did not change their election laws. He sued 30 states to force the release of their voter rolls.

(Trump is obviously not alone. The Republican Party habitually blames China for problems created by the Republican Party, or as cover for doing what they really want to do, for instance, rigging free and fair elections. Just this morning, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told Fox Business that popular rage against data centers, especially in rural areas where the GOP dominates public affairs, "is a Chinese psy-op. I really believe that. That's not a conspiracy theory." Whenever a Republican says "that's not a conspiracy theory," it is.)

So, for Trump, China is to blame for, well, you name it. Over the last decade, Trump has said America has got to get tough on China or suffer the consequences. But last week, when it came time to face the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, what did Trump do? Did he show toughness? Was he the strongman America needs? Here's the Times: "any public hint of that concern disappeared, replaced by an ebullience that bordered on gushing."

In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump said, "we can't continue to allow China to rape our country, and that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world." But a decade later, he said, "President Xi and I have forged a friendship, a truly great friendship, actually." On social media, he added that the meeting was one of "friendship, strength and success." He said Xi looked “strong, vibrant, and fit — better than ever.”

Watching it all, Max Boot said, "Trump’s most important transformation has been from China hawk to China dove." But that almost certainly overstates reality. He didn't mean what he said back then. He doesn't mean what he says right now. Nothing matters, except what's personally beneficial to him, not even the fact that China is helping Iran kill Americans in the war. (He refused to call out Russia for doing the same thing.) For God's sake, Trump's nihilism is such that, according to the AP, he actually asked Xi if he would be interested in buying US armaments. That's not a strongman. That's a man who will say anything for a buck.

In the end, it may be a public service for Trump to run ads for a campaign that no longer exists, thus reminding everyone of the things that he said, and the fact that he didn't mean them. But no ad is needed. Trump sold the idea that he would make America great, in part by being tough on China, but when faced with a chance to confront the enemy, he flinched.

Trump-appointed judge ruins America's 'collective mental health' break

Thursday’s ruling from U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly putting an end to Trump’s White House media ban was lamentable for the speed with which it was issued. An exhausted nation was enjoying a break from Trump’s vitriol dominating every channel but, alas, the reprieve was short-lived.

On September 24, only three days after banned outlets CNN, MSN, and Politico sued, Kelly ordered the White House to ‘immediately return, reinstate, and restore’ their access to the White House. The judge said the banned media outlets had met the legal thresholds for a temporary restraining order, which he put into effect for 14 days. “This is a high bar,” Kelly wrote, “but Plaintiffs have met it.”

At argument, Trump’s DOJ made a laughable attempt to call his press ban a “matter of national security.” The DOJ argued that the three banned news organizations engaged in a “non-exhaustive list of reporting incidents” that “threatened national security and spread falsehoods.” Those incidents included publishing construction details about the East Wing bunker, reporting on who is really funding the White House ballroom, and reports detailing how U.S. munitions stockpiles were affected by the administration’s mistakes in Iran.

Kelly rejected the DOJ’s “national security” explanation as an after-the-fact justification. The judge noted that Trump had not used a national security argument when he announced the ban, but instead focused solely on what Trump called negative coverage of his administration.

Trump TV: when a man gasps for attention like a fish out of water

On the day of the hearing Wednesday, after Kelly had failed to immediately rule, even though the ban was a textbook example of government censorship, I was hopeful the judge would drag his decision out, because other major news networks had suspended their shared pooled television coverage of Trump in solidarity with the banned networks. The media boycott left Trump with comically reduced media exposure as even The New York Times and The Washington Post stopped publishing new Trump images.

The media blackout was so effective, it seemed perhaps Kelly, a Trump appointee, might have a partisan motive in prolonging it: to help Republican candidates in competitive races by reducing Trump’s face time. A delayed ruling meant continued diminished Trump coverage, also a welcome balm for our collective mental health.

But taking airtime from a creature formed by Reality TV and media attention was like taking a fish out of water. Deprived of 24/7 media attention, Trump’s pitiful wet flopping on the deck prompted his staff to create a quick and embarrassing replacement: Trump TV, a 24-hour YouTube livestream of White House coverage — curated, of course, by the White House.

Trump calls himself the “King of Ratings,” but Trump TV debuted to hilariously small numbers, peaking at around 8,000 viewers and frequently dropping down to a few thousand. As of Thursday morning, under 500 live viewers were watching. The internet blew up over the fact that a YouTube stream of a black screen and box fan had more viewers than Trump. One of the funniest sentences ever written, thank you Roxanne Cooper of Alternet, said it all: “Trump TV was similarly crushed by random ambient streams of people getting pedicures.”

And now, a blatantly illegal campaign ad

Trump’s lesson in humility would be funny, but Trump has taken State TV to the next illegal level. Fox News is now airing a new partisan ad promoting Trump, “paid for by the U.S. government.” The 30-second video combines rapid cuts of Trump, American flags, and military aircraft, alongside claims about tax cuts, manufacturing, and policing. Images of Trump are accompanied by a choir singing, “Love me,” repeatedly. It ends with Dana White saying, “He is the toughest, most resilient person I’ve ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.”

Spending tax dollars on political campaign ads has long been illegal under federal law. The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees, as well as local government employees under federally funded programs, from engaging in political activities of any kind while they are on the clock. The General Government Appropriations Act also prohibits the expenditure of any tax dollars to produce partisan content. Ads that glorify an official or an administration, like singing “Love me” against a backdrop of militaristic Trump images and brags, blatantly violate both laws.

Internet reaction was swift and correct. Occupy Democrats' Grant Stern tweeted, “Dear Leader is using YOUR tax dollars to make this insane propaganda with a musical track that says 'Love Me' on repeat.” Author Brendan Noble asked, “Why is the U.S. Government paying for cult-level media like this? 'Love me' over images of Trump feels like some weird psychological play. Regardless, it's propaganda with our tax dollars.”

The cost of the absence of truth

The ad is an obviously illegal use of taxpayer dollars, and a legal reckoning will come at some point, IF the 90 million voters who stayed home in 2024 care more about the price of gas than they cared about Trump’s J6 coup attempt. But more dangerous than Trump’s continued abuse of power is the fact that Trump appears to believe his own falsehoods.

Much noise has been made about Trump’s assistant Natalie Harp, who follows him around with a portable printer. It’s widely reported that Harp shows Trump only favorable news stories, positive polling, and praise. Trump inhales that disinformation and regurgitates it back to a press pool allergic to hard questions because they are owned by Trump’s corporate backers.

Steady flattery may make the job more palatable to a man getting tired of politics, but it’s dangerous. Trump can’t make informed decisions if he only hears information he wants to hear; advisors with nefarious intentions can also shape information to manipulate him. But that’s what seems to be happening: Trump believes we are winning the war in Iran because Hegseth tells him we are; he believes the economy is strong; he thinks world leaders respect him, even as they mock him and move toward alliances excluding the U.S.

Unfavored media outlets’ crucial role is correcting Trump’s misinformation on everything — the war in Iran, the economy, even foreign trade. They may have returned to the White House, but the extreme danger of a president so insulated from the truth that he believes his own propaganda remains.

Thursday’s ruling from U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly putting an end to Trump’s White House media ban was lamentable for the speed with which it was issued. An exhausted nation was enjoying a break from Trump’s vitriol dominating every channel but, alas, the reprieve was short-lived.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Subscribe to her free Substack, The Haake Take.

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Florida 'paying big price' for Trump’s Canadian trade war

The U.S. has such a toxic brand that, despite the huge World Cup events, folks don't want to come to the U.S. on vacation and spend hefty tourism dollars.

Axios reported the new numbers this week, and a CNN report noted Monday the U.S. suffered a 20 percent drop in tourism in 2026 from 2025.

The U.S. Travel Association president Geoff Freeman explained that it isn't something happening around the world. This significant drop is coming from tourism only to the United States.

"Travel around the world is growing at a 5 to 10 percent clip, and it's dropping to the U.S. in the same numbers," he said.

CNN co-host Boris Sanchez asked how it would have been different if there hadn't been a huge World Cup event, and Freeman agreed it would have been far worse.

"This is a trend," he explained. "We welcomed nearly 80 million visitors in 2019. We haven't gotten back to that number any year since. While the rest of the world continues to grow, we obviously need to revisit our strategy to figure out what we're going to do to turn the tide."

There were already huge drops in tourism amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now those numbers are falling even more.

It prompted the CNN hosts to ask what could possibly be causing this anti-American sentiment.

Freeman explained that it's more than just one specific thing.

"There's a variety of reasons they're not coming," he said. "Cost matters. It's because of the war in Ukraine. You can't fly over Russian airspace for Asian travelers. Certainly there are some for whom politics matters, and they're swearing off the United States. I think what's happening more often than not, though, is travelers are reading the foreign press. They're seeing these horror stories. They're worried that if I come here, I'm going to get detained. My device is going to be searched. They're fearful."

One story reported by The Guardian revealed 65-year-old British tourist Karen Newton was detained for six weeks after her tourist visa to the U.S. expired.

Becky Burke, a 28-year-old Welsh backpacker, was held for 19 days and led away in chains. The U.S. claimed she had to be detained "related to the violation of the terms and conditions of her admission." Burke's mother said she thinks the authorities misunderstood. She said that her daughter was trading work around the house for stays at various accommodations, the BBC reported. Burke's mother thinks that they considered this "employment" in the U.S. when she wasn't approved for that.

Still, Freeman said that stories like those are "a misperception of what happens."

He claimed that the World Cup helped dispel a lot of those stories, but it didn't help reset beliefs around the world about the U.S.

Given most tourism is to states like California, Florida, New York and Texas, Freeman said that those states are experiencing huge increases in cost.

"Florida is paying a big price for the drop in Canadian visitation," said Freeman. Canadians began boycotting the U.S. amid President Donald Trump's trade war.

Freeman explained that it isn't merely tourism; Canadian business travel has also fallen.

"People who would come to buy a Caterpillar tractor, they would come to go look at another American good. They're deciding to go to another country right now," said Freeman. "That's the loss we're feeling. Not to mention the fact that these people that come here, we know when they're here, they enjoy their time. They go home and tell their friends and family about the experience they had. When they don't come, it doesn't just cost us now. It costs us down the road because we continue to drive these travelers into the arms of other countries."


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Trump may have just accidentally created the authority to 'lock him up'

Veterans are standing in the middle of D.C.’s Memorial Circle at rush hour with banners denouncing plans for Trump’s arch. Their continuing protest, which started on Memorial Day, features a replica arch and an urgent plea to “protect and defend the solemnity and honor of this hallowed ground.”

The veterans have a point the rest of us need to hear, including 'unitary executive’ nonsense-spouting Supreme Court justices who think the madman at the helm is free to take a wrecking ball to our nation’s historical monuments. At 25 stories tall, Trump’s arch would deliberately diminish the stature of monuments around it, and would forever obscure historical sightlines, laid after the Civil War to symbolize national healing.

At the protests, Retired Army Colonel Ann Wright, a 29-year Special Operations officer, carries an “over our dead bodies” banner for “Mr. Bonespurs, with five deferments from the military.” The veterans’ spokesperson explained that, “To place a memorial that would obstruct the unbroken viewshed from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington Cemetery would totally destroy all that this space represents.”

Trump’s sacrilege

The targeted sightline, unbroken across the Potomac River via the Arlington Memorial Bridge, was rendered two generations after the Civil War as a symbol of national reconciliation. The memorial to Abraham Lincoln, preserver of the Union, deliberately overlooks Arlington, the estate of Confederate Robert E. Lee and the hallowed burial grounds for both sides, to symbolize the enduring triumph of national unity over the tragedy of division.

Alignment of those monuments was key. Lincoln’s memorial (‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’) solemnly overlooks the shared blood and soil of Arlington’s dead. Veterans are concerned that a giant arch dominating Arlington, now the final resting place of more than 400,000 war veterans, many of whom died in battle, would overpower the significance of their sacrifice.

Retired Army Major General Paul Eaton called the arch “entirely inappropriate, (bordering) on sacrilege to the men and women buried” there. A Gold Star mother whose son is buried at Arlington lamented grievously that the arch’s planned observation deck means tourists will be able to take selfies while burials are happening.

“We don’t need tourists overlooking funerals. I’m just appalled,” she said. “We need everybody to speak out about this.”

The legal battle

In May, a federal panel packed with Trump appointees approved plans for the arch, then in August, the National Park Service found the monument would have “adverse effects” on several historic sites. Although aviation experts noted the hazards of a 250-foot arch near the runway of one of the nation’s busiest airports, last week Trump’s FAA approved the plans.

Meanwhile, Vietnam War veterans have sued to stop the project, challenging the arch for both lacking congressional authority and blocking historically significant monument sightlines. Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered the administration to provide at least 48 hours’ notice before conducting any activities on the planned arch while the case is pending.

After that order, over a year after revealing plans for the arch, and after the Supreme Court let Trump get away with his ballroom on manufactured national security grounds, Trump then raised a national security rationale for the arch. Last Sunday, Trump claimed that he’d “agreed” to convert the proposed arch, at the “strong request” of the military, “into a top grade Military Complex/ Triumphal Arch,” alleging that:

"(F)or National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, (laughably false)… into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch…”

Trump said his arch would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.” Arlington’s historic message of national healing — and the devastation of its opposite — is sadly lost on the most divisive president in our nation’s history. He also seems to miss how a Hitler-inspired monument would discourage tourists who may not want snipers aimed at their heads.

Ye old national security ruse

Courts have long given deference to the executive on matters of national security. In 1936, the Supreme Court said presidents must have ‘wide latitude in security affairs,’ reiterating the same in 1988, and again in 2018. Small wonder Trump is now claiming that his decorative arch is “necessary to protect US national security.”

Never mind that it took Trump over a year to manufacture a “national security” rationale for his obviously ornamental arch.

Trump’s security claim is just another well-worn litigation ruse. He also cited national security to defend both unconstitutional immigration tactics and his ban of several media outlets from the White House. He even claimed that trade relations posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to national security” to defend his tariffs, an argument the Supreme Court rejected.

The ballroom decision illustrates the flaw of the “unitary executive” theory

After the Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump’s sprawling ballroom, however, the same flawed analysis could protect Trump’s arch. Even after Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Trump’s ballroom was “likely unlawful,” the other conservative justices determined that the National Trust for Historic Preservation couldn’t block it, because “mere offense, disagreement, or distaste” wasn’t enough to constitute an injury for purposes of standing, trashing decades of legal precedent whereby historic preservationists successfully sued to protect historic landmarks.

The question now dangling before a nation dreading a Hitlerian arch in D.C. is this: If a National Trust created by Congress to act as guardians of historic monuments doesn’t have standing to sue to protect those monuments, who the hell does?

If SCOTUS approves this arch, under its misguided ‘unitary executive’ theory that contradicts the founders’ intentions of never having a king again, wait for Trump to sandblast his name into all four sides of the Washington Monument, install a statue of himself sitting in the Lincoln Memorial, and carve his own face on Mount Rushmore.

The only silver lining of such a ruling would be that the next president would then possess the legal authority to build another monument on the basis of national security: a permanent prison cell around Trump, open for public viewing at feeding times. Only then, the security justification will be real.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. You can subscribe to her free Substack, The Haake Take.

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Legal scholar makes the case to indict Trump for war crimes

President Donald Trump must be indicted for war crimes, one legal scholar argued for The Hill, and while there are various legal grounds on which this could be done, one particular "atrocity" stands above them all.

Bennett L. Gershman is a veteran law professor at Pace University, who also previously worked as a prosecutor for the New York State Anti-Corruption Office. On Monday afternoon, he published a new op-ed for The Hill, expressing how "surreal" it felt to see Trump threaten to "annihilate" Iran during his recent United Nations address, not long after the organization's Human Rights Council "issued a report finding 'reasonable grounds to believe' that the U.S. had committed war crimes on Feb. 28, 2026, the day Trump launched his war on Iran by bombing a girls’ school in the southern city of Minab," a strike that killed 157 people.

"Trump’s performance at the U.N. featured his disdain for the principles of the United Nations, his mockery of the preeminence of international law, and his scorn for the values of human dignity and justice," Gershman wrote. "To Trump, it seems, coercion overrides cooperation, and force determines who lives and who dies. He boasted that 'I have used strength to make America the most powerful country in the world,' and that 'to the victor belong the spoils.'

While the "horrific bombing" of the girls' school in Iran was the primary reason Gershman put forward to justify indicting Trump, it was far from the only one mentioned.

"Trump should be indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including his administration’s actions in killing multiple people in boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific waters, claiming, without evidence, that they were smuggling drugs, as well as his invasion of Venezuela, which involved killing scores of civilians in the course of arresting leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife," Gershman argued.

Gershman conceded that public awareness of the strike might not be strong, given the fact that "news reports and official post-mortems of war tragedies often elude scrutiny, especially the details of airstrikes, targets, identification of munitions, casualties and attribution." The U.N. report, he explained, included numerous harrowing details, including "Pre-strike photographs [depicting] classrooms furnished with educational materials, children’s artwork and learning aids" and "satellite imagery" showing children in a courtyard. It also includes heartbreaking and graphic details from the immediate aftermath of the strike, which the report determined "was the intended point of impact," and not the result of "an errant strike or collateral damage."

"The International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, has issued indictments and arrest warrants for 74 individuals during its tenure, including Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity," Gershman concluded. "Trump and members of his administration should be concerned that they also may be indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity."

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Trump has finally united Americans with one simple word

For the first time in decades, anger over corruption is a topline issue in a national election, according to major polls. While Americans have long regarded the federal government as infested with crooks, they are at long last taking names and kicking -- uh, demanding accountability.

What the polling also shows very clearly is that we owe this overdue change to President Donald J. Trump, whose self-serving misconduct has enraged most voters.

For a journalist who has reported on corruption across the political spectrum for decades, this revival of civic consciousness is refreshing (and a bit stunning). To be honest, I've spent countless hours poring over dusty records to expose misconduct by politicians of both parties, often without arousing much electoral indignation. Two years ago, I published "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism," a book that tells how Trump and his predecessors have ruthlessly ripped off the public and their own followers.

But that was then -- and now feels very different.

Three weeks ago, Gallup released a new poll finding that 89% of Americans, a record high, believe that government corruption is endemic, an increase of 10% over 2025.

That total includes 91% of Democrats, 90% of independents and 83% of Republicans -- and it coincides with Trump's return to the White House. Many other polls have reported similar results in recent months, notably a September UMass-Amherst poll showing that 97% of respondents perceive corruption in Washington; an August Ipsos poll that found "overwhelming bipartisan majorities" share this sentiment. A survey conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice showed 97% consider corruption "a big systemic problem" in our politics and government.

Recent polling also suggests that voters have observed the explosive corruption pouring billions into Trump family accounts with growing disgust. Nearly 70% of respondents to a Reuters/Ipsos poll in August said Trump "inappropriately" uses presidential power to reap personal profits. Almost simultaneously, a UMass-Amherst poll showed that 53% identified the presidency as the "most corrupt" element in a broadly tainted federal government. And this month, a poll by The Economist and YouGov said that C-word is most frequently chosen by voters to describe Trump.

Nobody who covers government, including me, would claim that Democrats as a party are exempt from the crimes and misdemeanors afflicting officialdom. But what we have seen with Trump and the Republicans surrounding him is so disproportionate and brazen as to dwarf whatever came before. In this cycle, we have dozens of Republicans -- notably including Maine Sen. Susan Collins -- come under plausible suspicion of misconduct or worse.

That may be why Democrats stand to benefit from the renewed public concern over grift and graft. According to the latest survey by Rasmussen Reports, a pollster notorious for its Republican skew, "the Democratic Party is more trusted than Republicans to deal with corruption, an issue most voters say will be important in their midterm vote."

Should the Democrats win both houses of Congress, they will need to end the stock trading that harmed the reputations of leaders in both parties, among other reforms. And they must fulfill the promise by Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who would head the House Oversight Committee under a Democratic majority, to investigate "the Trump crime family."

Handwringing over how to confront Trump's corruption and misconduct probably led to his second term. No more dithering, Democrats.

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Trump shuts down review because backlash conflicts with his 'vision'

A historical preservation group said it was “gobsmacked” on Monday after the Trump administration said it was closing down its consultation with experts about President Donald Trump’s plan for a triumphal arch in Washington, DC, because addressing their concerns and those from the general public would require them to deviate from the president’s vision for the project.

On Thursday, Travis Voyles, the Trump-appointed vice chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), sent a letter informing civil society and historic preservation groups that it was ending the federal review of how the 250-foot-tall arch would harm nearby historical sites.

That review is required under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which mandates that federal agencies, including the National Park Service (NPS), consider how a project will affect historic properties and seek ways to “avoid, minimize, or mitigate” the harms of a planned project.

The federal regulations governing the Section 106 process explicitly state that “the views of the public are essential to informed federal decisionmaking,” and require agencies to “seek and consider” those views.

The administration, via the NPS, has acknowledged that the Triumphal Arch would have “adverse effects” on historical sites, disrupting views of Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and dozens of others. Meanwhile, the proposal has received over 107,000 public comments, most of which are negative, according to a sample from the DC Preservation Office.

But rather than taking the public concern as a reason to reevaluate or scale back the project, Voyles explained that the ACHP was choosing to end public consultation altogether because taking it into account would require changing the “fundamental nature” of the project in a way that the administration would never accept.

“It is clear that the proposed undertaking and its potential effects on historic properties have raised significant public interest, and the NPS stated in its September 22, 2026 correspondence that it believes additional consultation on the existing proposal is unlikely to result in agreement... to resolve adverse effects,” he wrote.

“Further, the NPS stated that implementation of alternatives to avoid or minimize the adverse effects would alter the fundamental nature of the proposed undertaking and fail to achieve its goals,” he continued, explaining that “in recognition of the public’s significant concerns,” they were “hereby terminating” consultation.

Voyles said the ACHP would create its own recommendations and deliver them by October 7 to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose office is overseeing the project. Burgum is legally required to consider and formally respond to those recommendations, but unlike a legally binding memorandum of agreement, he does not have to follow them.

The ACHP has set a deadline for public comments for Tuesday night at 11:59 pm and said it planned another meeting with consulting parties.

One of the outside groups involved in the consultation process was The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), a national historic-landscape preservation nonprofit, whose founder and CEO, Charles Birnbaum, worked at the NPS for 15 years and was the principal author of the federal guidelines for cultural landscapes.

Section 106 requires consultation to begin “at the early stages of project planning.” But TCLF says the review began only after the Commission of Fine Arts had approved the arch’s design.

Meanwhile, the TCLF has said that it and other relevant preservation groups were invited to only a single meeting on September 9, just weeks before public consultation was terminated. They said this indicated that any real alternative proposals had essentially been taken off the table.

On Monday, Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch News published a letter from the TCLF savaging the administration’s “extraordinary” reasoning for canceling the public consultation.

“Mr. Voyles has written a singularly audacious letter,” it said. “Rather than address the ‘public’s significant concerns regarding the adverse effects’ on one of the nation’s most revered and symbolically important cultural landscapes through an authentic public engagement process that doesn’t foreclose avoidance as a precondition, the administration, through its proxy, the ACHP, has decided the public’s role is meaningless, unimportant, and of no value whatsoever.”

The question of historical preservation is one of numerous legal issues facing Trump’s effort to build the arch, which is estimated to cost at least $100 million, though the administration has not published an official price tag.

Although it will be partially funded by taxpayers, Congress has not yet authorized the project, leading to a federal lawsuit seeking to block construction.

Outcry over the public funding for the project led Trump last week to propose using the monument as a “military complex” that would house drones, ammunition, and snipers. He has similarly attempted to justify his taxpayer-funded White House ballroom project by giving it a dual national security purpose.

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95 pages of chaos: The White House rules that nearly tanked the election

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned.

According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute.

Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service.

Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure.

“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said.

ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives, including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.

“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.”

Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”

A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.

He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”

In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless.

“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting.

Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed.

Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.

When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.

Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery.

“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.

The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.

The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.

They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list.

“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)

Almost immediately after the executive order became public, four separate lawsuits challenging it were filed by states led by Democrats and political and civil rights groups. Democratic members of Congress and postal union leaders urged the Postal Service and its Board of Governors, which had long defended the agency’s independence, to resist. A June 2026 Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to remove leaders of many agencies long considered independent gave the governors pause, however.

Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order.

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.

As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone.

The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.

It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks?

“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.

The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”

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