Wild Wednesday Reads: An Out of Control President and the Upcoming Midterms
Good Afternoon!!
Historian Heather Cox Richardson used her post this morning to list the numerous insane things Trump has said in his rally speeches and recent social media posts. I can’t include them all, so I hope you’ll go read her entire piece.
Judging from his social media posts, Trump is panicking.
Shortly after noon yesterday, he posted that it was “no longer the Strait of Hormuz” driving up gasoline prices, but Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s refineries. In fact, some oil tankers have indeed been passing through the strait but, as Spencer Kimball of CNBC explains, “only due to a major U.S. military commitment and at a high cost to the lives of tanker crews.” That policy was already too expensive to sustain, and now increased strikes from Iran are threatening it altogether.
Then, clearly incensed at reports that people are not turning out for his rallies, he posted pictures to prove the arenas were full, but those pictures were carefully cropped to avoid the empty upper decks shown in news photographs. “I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!” he posted. “The Rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.” He added: “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country.”
Then he accused the New York Times of doctoring a picture of his Miami club, Trump National Doral, where he has announced he will hold this year’s Group of 20 (G20) summit of leaders from the world’s major advanced and emerging economies this December. His attempt to hold the G7 there in 2019 created an uproar even from Republicans about the blatant self-dealing.
There is less uproar now, leaving Trump free to complain that the New York Times “is a CROOKED outfit that caters to Lunatics who want to see our Country fail” and to warn that “Some day in the not too distant future The Times will be forced to close its dirty doors, and that will be a Great Day for America!” [….]
Then Trump posted a wild attack on Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from South Carolina, Annie Andrews, in an effort to boost his hand-picked candidate, Darline Graham, the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. Begging people to vote for her, he wrote: “For years my dear friend Lindsey would say that, ‘Darline is the finest, most reliable, and one of the smartest people I have ever known.’ He would then always add, ‘Also, the most loyal!’ Oftentimes I would be upset with Lindsey for saying this, because I thought I had all of those qualities.”
Why is Trump suddenly interested in South Carolina? As William Kristol noted in The Bulwark today, new polls show that Andrews, a doctor who has refused to respond to what Kristol calls Trump’s revolting bigotry, is competitive against Graham, whose major qualification for the seat is that she is Graham’s sister….
With media stories noting that Republican candidates do not want to be seen with Trump, this morning he posted: “My Rally crowds and enthusiasm are unbelievable! Nobody has ever seen anything like it. We are flipping races all over the place. The Fake News knows it, but they don’t want to be truthful with their viewers. It’s all happening! The Dumocrats never counted on this….
About an hour and a half later, he posted: “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!”
And there is much more childish nonsense at the link. At this point, most people know what to expect from this horrible man, but he is getting worse. He no longer seems to have any inhibitions about what he says or does. At this point, I’m just holding on to the hope that the Democrats will take over the House and Senate in the midterm elections. I don’t think our country can survive two more years of this insanity.
Things are looking very bad for Republicans at the moment, and I’m afraid that Trump is going to try to interfere with elections. Will he send ICE to intimidate voters at the polls? Could he find a way to declare a state of emergency or even try to invoke the insurrection act? I wouldn’t put anything past him. He is definitely doing everything he can to suppress votes that might go to Democrats.
Jacob Knutson at Democracy Docket: ICE probed hundreds of voter registration groups across the U.S.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the past year investigated hundreds of nonprofits across the U.S. that help people register to vote, according to new records analyzed by Democracy Docket.
The internal government documents, which were obtained by the legal nonprofit Democracy Forward*, showed that Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative arm, also contemplated sending undercover agents to investigate the organizations.
The investigations into the organizations were part of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) extensive, resource-intensive search for illegal voting by noncitizens.
For years, President Donald Trump has used claims of noncitizens voting to call into question election results and push for stricter voting laws. In reality, noncitizen voting is exceptionally rare, and there is no credible evidence that it has swayed an election.
As part of its attempt to influence election procedures and restrict who can vote, the Trump administration has increasingly scrutinized nonprofits that conduct voter registration activities.
Also from Jacob Knutson at Democracy Docket: ICE shared voter data with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, new documents show.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shared voter data with Palantir, the data analytics and software giant co-founded by the conservative political activist and avowed skeptic of democracy Peter Thiel, according to internal government documents reviewed by Democracy Docket.
As of this summer, Palantir was preparing to enter the voter data into an expansive and controversial surveillance tool the company developed for ICE’s immigration enforcement operations across the country, the documents reveal.
Will ICE be at the polls in November?
That offers further evidence that ICE — the immigration agency that President Donald Trump rapidly expanded during his second term — is now being employed in the president’s multifront attack on elections….
It’s unclear precisely where ICE obtained the voter records. However, the data involved voters in at least six states: Missouri, Michigan, New Mexico, Connecticut, Georgia and Kentucky.
It’s also uncertain how that information would be pertinent to ICE’s operations, as state voter data would contain very little information on noncitizens. But Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed — erroneously — that illegal voting by noncitizens is widespread as they attempt to influence state election procedures, push for stricter voting laws and undermine election results.
The nonprofit legal group Democracy Forward* obtained the government documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE seeking any information about the agency’s role in election-related operations. The records are a series of reports Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) — the immigration agency’s investigative arm — made for other parts of the Department of Homeland Security.
HSI shared the information with Palantir as part of DHS’s sweeping search for illegal voting by noncitizens before the upcoming midterms.
Thiel has been a major funder of Republican causes, including Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he once wrote, explaining his strategy for achieving his libertarian goals.
As we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks, Trump is actually trying to buy votes by claiming he will pay every adult in the country $5,000 if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate. He is also promising smaller amounts to certain groups and he’s used taxpayer money to buy TV ads praising himself.
Aaron Blake at CNN: Trump is clearly trying to buy votes with taxpayer money.
President Donald Trump is ramping up his efforts to use taxpayer money and resources to help Republicans win the 2026 midterm elections.
And it’s not at all subtle.
At last month’s Republican midterm convention, he severely pushed the envelope by promising every adult US citizen $5,000 if Republicans hold both the House and the Senate. That was already stunning — to offer voters money for a specific outcome. But Trump has only continued pushing the envelope since then.
Over the last 10 days, he has run more than a dozen different government-funded ads that are geared toward promoting himself and his supposed accomplishments.
Last week, Trump held two separate White House events in which he made exaggerated promises about major economic projects in key states holding crucial Senate races.
Also last week, the administration sent $500 checks to nearly 1 million Obamacare recipients.
By Friday, the administration apparently found yet more money to send out: $90 for around 20 million senior citizens to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums.
And in recent days, Trump has re-upped his $5,000 pitch on social media and featured it prominently at rallies in Alabama and Oklahoma.
Read more at the CNN link.
Jonathan Cohn at The Bulwark: Donald Trump Is Buying Votes at $500 a Pop.
DONALD TRUMP IS HAVING the federal government send checks to millions of Americans, evidently in hopes they forget all the ways he and the Republicans have made health care harder to obtain and harder to afford.
Or, to put it more bluntly, Trump is using public money to buy votes.
Over the past month, the administration has announced two sets of payments. One of them—$500 per person—is going to about a million people who bought health insurance through HealthCare.gov, the online marketplace that is part of the Affordable Care Act. The other payments, $90 each, are going to about 20 million seniors and people with disabilities who have Medicare Part B, the portion of the program that pays for doctor visits and other outpatient services.
The official rationale for the $500 checks is that they are a “refund” going to people “overcharged” by the Biden administration for HealthCare.gov coverage. A letter accompanying the checks and sent with Trump’s signature says so, before listing off what Trump claims are his many accomplishments on health care, like the agreements he reached with major pharmaceutical companies.
“I am proud to return your money to you,” the letter states, “and I will never stop fighting to put the American People FIRST, restore Affordability, protect your hard-earned money, and lower the Cost of Healthcare.”
But just as those drug company agreements haven’t really produced huge savings, so these new $500 checks to HealthCare.gov buyers aren’t actually a refund for supposed overcharges. In reality, the money comes from
funds earmarked to finance operations for the Affordable Care Act, so that it can reach more people and function more efficiently.
Trump is raiding these funds, in ways that test or maybe even blow past the law’s limits. And this isn’t some isolated occurrence. Those checks represent just one instance of what has become routine since January 2025: Trump commandeering taxpayer dollars and official government channels for his own personal agenda, whether it’s putting up a ballroom or boosting the Republican brand or airing TV ads glorifying himself.
Read more at The Bulwark. It’s a long article, and very interesting.
This happened yesterday. Felicia Schwartz at MSNOW: Trump administration refuses international election monitors for first time in over 2 decades.
The Trump administration declined to invite election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to witness the midterms, meaning observers from the regional security group won’t be at a U.S. election for the first time in more than two decades.
Their absence comes as Democrats and election integrity experts have raised concerns about potential election meddling after the Department of Justice announced plans to send its own monitors.
Washington joins only Russia and Belarus in its decision to exclude OSCE observers.
The OSCE called the U.S. decision “regrettable” and Human Rights Watch said the move “fuels fears of serious human rights concerns around the upcoming elections.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told MS NOW the administration’s decision “risks undermining public trust in America’s safe and secure election system.”
“The Trump administration’s decision not to invite international observers to the United States is deeply antithetical to the spirit of freedom, democracy and transparency that defines our elections,” she said, adding that the U.S. should hold “itself to the same standards that we would expect of any other democracy.”
Asked why the U.S. did not invite observers this year, a State Department spokesperson said OSCE “should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact.”
The OSCE has observed every federal election in the U.S. since 2002. OSCE monitors typically visit some polling stations and issue a report about how the elections were conducted, among other activities.
Monitors do not interfere and have no enforcement power, with their access to polling stations decided by each state.
Read more at the link.
Apparently, Trump is also thinking about what to do if Democrats do win the House and Senate. He has been meeting with his old gang from 2020.
Brenden Racius at The Independent: Trump hosts election denier Tina Peters for strategy summit at White House as midterms look grim: insider.
President Donald Trump met with election denier Tina Peters at the White House this week to discuss “election integrity,” a former administration official has said.
President Donald Trump hosted election denier Tina Peters at the White House to discuss ‘election integrity’ this week, according to a new report (Getty Images)
A former Colorado elections clerk, Peters became a cause célèbre among Trump and his MAGA supporters after she was convicted for her role in a breach of election equipment and subsequently imprisoned. Her sentence was commuted this summer.
Ed Martin, a former interim U.S. attorney who represented numerous defendants charged in the January 6 Capitol riot, claimed the meeting between Trump and Peters took place on Monday.
“Well, let me break some news,” Martin told Real America’s Voice host Eric Bolling during a Monday interview. “Just hours ago, maybe two hours ago, Tina Peters, you know, from Colorado, was in the Oval Office meeting with the President on election integrity, and they were talking about the plans…”
The reported summit comes one month before the November midterms, with polls suggesting Republicans could lose seats, and potentially their majorities, in both the House and Senate. Trump has repeatedly claimed that Democrats will cheat in the midterms, echoing his longstanding, baseless assertions that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
“And so when Tina Peters, you know, famous Colorado clerk, was in the Oval Office today just two hours ago talking about this question, the president’s taking it seriously,” Martin said.
Martin also suggested Trump may act unilaterally if Congress failed to pass the Save America Act, GOP-backed legislation that would require proof of citizenship for new voters.
“If the Congress won’t pass the Save America Act and they won’t, then the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do,” Martin added. “And it is not a local issue when it’s national security, and it’s clearly national security. So we’ll see how it plays out.”
More details from Matt Cohen at Democracy Docket: Election deniers Cleta Mitchell and Tina Peters want Trump’s commerce secretary to seize voting machines.
With Election Day less than a month away, anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell and convicted election denier Tina Peters are pushing a scheme to have Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seize voting machines, as part of a broader effort for the Trump administration to interfere with the midterm vote.
The scheme has been circulating among election deniers since late last year, but Peters has led the effort to bring it to President Donald Trump’s attention since August. On Monday, Peters reportedly met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss election security issues, according to former U.S. Department of Justice pardon attorney Ed Martin.
Cleta Mitchell
Peters, Martin and other conspiracists have long pushed the false claims that voting machines are compromised because they use some foreign-made parts. Election deniers claim that poses a national security risk.
Now, they want the Trump administration to use that as justification to seize voting machines. And they believe that the commerce secretary already has authority to do that — a view that legal experts say is way off base.
Martin claims that Peters discussed this scheme with Trump during this week’s White House visit.
“They were talking about the plans, and the one thing that they know is that Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin, of the Department of Homeland Security, came out in late August and conceded and said… ‘the machines for voting… use parts from China and Russia, and foreign places, and are therefore compromised,” Martin said….
It’s not exactly a new idea. For months, Peters and others have called on Trump to declare a national emergency to wrest control of aspects of voting from the states. But the latest scheme Peters is pushing revolves around a 2019 executive order Trump signed during his first term to protect U.S.-made technology, which Peters now wants to use to seize voting machines.
According to Ed Martin, Trump is taking all this seriously. All of these people are insane, but so is Trump.
Trump has reason to be worried.
Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, and Lisa Kashinsky at Politico: Republicans enter triage mode as their election hopes continue to dim.
Republicans are flooding the electoral map with a deluge of advertising to defend their House and Senate majorities. But their once-towering financial advantage is starting to show its limits.
In recent days, Republican campaign groups began to make concessions to the punishing political environment, shifting money away from races they no longer believe to be winnable and falling back to reinforce another tier of seats in solidly red states that no longer look safe.
After abandoning a GOP-held Senate seat in North Carolina — a state President Donald Trump won three times — the outside groups began spending money to defend a seat in South Carolina. And they’re intensifying their advertising in Kansas, where Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in nearly a century.
In the battle for control of the House, national Republicans gave up on defending a blue-leaning seat in Nebraska held for a decade by retiring GOP Rep. Don Bacon.
Those dispiriting setbacks signal that the party’s defensive position is weakening with a month still left in the campaign.
One national Republican strategist, granted anonymity to speak freely about the party’s predicament, said the GOP could wind up facing even worse losses than in President George W. Bush’s disastrous second term.
“If the bottom continues falling out like it has been,” this operative said, “this will be worse than 2006.”
As Trump’s approval continues to sag amid soaring gas and diesel prices driven by the war with Iran, Democrats are bullish that the map will continue to grow for them. And while Republicans still maintain a big outside money advantage, the recent moves show it’s not unlimited — with more tough decisions likely before Election Day.
Another national GOP operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the landscape, put it simply: “fires everywhere.” The latest comes in South Carolina, where no Democrat has won a Senate race in three decades.
Isaac Arnsdorf at The Washington Post (gift link): Half a billion dollars in GOP spending does little to move polls.
Since Labor Day, when President Donald Trump opened up his war chest for the midterms, Republicans have pumped half a billion dollars into competitive House and Senate races.
A month later, the polls haven’t moved in their direction.
High-quality public surveys show Democratic Senate candidates tied or leading in Alaska, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — the same as before Labor Day. Democrats’ lead on the generic congressional ballot has slightly widened since, from about six points to roughly nine, according to analyst Nate Silver’s polling average.
President Donald Trump and Sen. Darline Graham attend a campaign rally on Aug. 21, 2026, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Win McNamee, Getty Images
Notably, the surge of attack ads has not sunk the Democrats at the center of some of the most expensive races. More voters hold a favorable than unfavorable view of Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, according to a late September New York Times/Siena poll — despite more than $115 million spent attacking him. Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s favorability actually increased by five points since August, to 47 percent, Fox News surveys show, despite $76.2 million in attacks.
One factor: Republicans’ advantage looks bigger in dollars than in actual airtime, thanks in part to the timing of their purchases. In Senate battlegrounds, the GOP spent 26 percent more than Democrats did to secure just 7 percent more broadcast ads, according to AdImpact….
“They should be getting more for what they’re spending, and they’re not,” said Lauren French, a spokeswoman for the pro-Democratic Senate Majority PAC. “Can they spend their way out of a bad economy, a bad president, a bad candidate, and a bad message in Texas and Kansas?”
In a cycle with so many advantages for Democrats — an unpopular president, an unpopular war, inflation, the usual pattern of midterm swings — money was supposed to be the GOP’s ace. In particular, Republicans were counting on the more than $400 million in Trump’s super PAC, plus a similar amounthesays is held in a related nonprofit, to come to their rescue. Trump has said he will spend $400 to $500 million on the midterms and save some for 2028. So far, his super PACs have reserved more than $194 million in advertising, according to media tracker AdImpact.
But the super PACs didn’t turn on the money until Labor Day, so they faced higher prices for scarcer airtime compared with groups that reserved their ads earlier. In addition, super PACs pay full freight for TV ads, while campaigns pay discounted rates; that has benefited Democrats whose candidates have been better fundraisers in high-profile contests, whereas Republicans have relied more heavily on party committees and super PACs under Trump’s control.
In Texas, the discrepancy is especially pronounced as the expensive Senate, House and governor’s races drive up prices for limited inventory. Last week in the Dallas media market, Talarico’s campaign paid $950,000 for the average viewer to see its ads 10 times, according to a Democratic media buyer. By comparison, Paxton allies spent $4.65 million for the average viewer to see their ads 13 times — five times the money for just 30 percent more impact.
Democrats have plenty of advantages, but Republicans hold the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court.
That’s it for me today. What do you think? What else is on your mind?
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