American politics has never had to deal with someone like Elon Musk before, said Andrew Egger on The Bulwark. There are other wealthy donors, of course, but none comparable to the world’s richest man.

Musk lavished about $450 million on Republican campaigns ahead of this week’s midterm elections – more than any single donor has ever spent on a US election cycle. Around $180 million of that went on unsuccessfully trying to stop the Democrat James Talarico winning the Texas Senate race. And Musk wasn’t just writing cheques. On his platform X, where “he has 241 million followers and owns the algorithms that ensure everyone sees his posts”, he relentlessly tweeted attacks on Talarico, calling him a creep who “will vote to take away your children and transition them”.

Musk’s efforts to swing the outcome may have failed, but they raised questions about his degree of influence, and put him in the Democrats’ sights, said Paul Blumenthal on HuffPost. Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, declared: “If you think retribution isn’t on the way, you’re mistaken.”

‘Berserk’ hatred

The Left has “gone nearly berserk” in its hatred of Musk, said Victor Davis Hanson on American Greatness. Back in the days when he supported the Democrats (Musk voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and claimed he voted for Joe Biden in 2020), liberals loved him and proudly drove Teslas. But now that he votes Republican, he’s a Nazi who’s out to buy elections. Never mind that the billionaire George Soros and his foundations “have channelled well over half a billion dollars to left-wing candidates and causes in just the last six years alone”.

Democrats are itching to launch investigations into Musk, said Robby Soave in Reason. And some are now even talking of nationalising his companies, including Starlink, claiming that they’re too important to be left under his control. This is a “dangerous” notion. It would unfairly target Musk and send a message to other innovators that they’d better not be too successful or they’ll be punished.

Critics must keep their vengeful feelings in check, agreed Marian L. Tupy on The Dispatch. While Musk should of course be held accountable for any violations of the law or any harms caused by his decisions, opponents shouldn’t turn political disagreement into a reason to “obstruct legitimate enterprise”. Musk can be arrogant, vindictive and rude, but his “failings should be weighed against his contributions to human progress”.

Oligarchy vs. democracy

If Musk stuck to technology, his “capricious, emotionally stunted man-baby” antics might not matter, said David Futrelle in The National. But he’s a political force: apparently willing to switch off Starlink with shocking effects on Ukraine; increasingly sceptical of democracy and willing to leverage his immense wealth to undermine it.

The sums he’s spending to tilt elections are unprecedented, and he seems to believe his wealth puts him above the law. When the tech journalist Kara Swisher predicted in a recent podcast that the Democrats would soon be investigating Musk over his huge government contracts and his leadership of the job-slashing Doge agency, he reacted furiously. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” he posted on X. “Sounds like Swisher really wants to go to prison.”

The good news is that Musk’s money couldn’t buy the Texas Senate seat, said Tim Murphy in Mother Jones – in part because Talarico’s campaign “was predicated on the idea that people like Musk would try to buy the seat”. Even so, this is a warning, said Perry Bacon in The New Republic. Democrats must restrict the vast and growing political power of billionaires, including liberal ones. “America can have an oligarchy or a democracy – not both.”

Immigrants granted release from ICE custody through court hearings may find themselves back in similar circumstances, as the agency has been rearresting people after a judge let them go. Advocates say this violates their civil rights.

‘Very, very sharp increase’

At least 20 people released from ICE detention following court proceedings in the last year were soon arrested again, according to an investigation by The Guardian. Most of these people were freed through habeas corpus petitions, which let detainees challenge the government’s legal right to imprison them.

There has been a “very, very sharp increase in people who are released on habeas petitions, only to be very rapidly redetained, often in violation of the federal court’s order,” Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, told The Guardian. One man, Akram Mahmoud Omar, 77, was released on a habeas corpus petition after suffering a heart attack at an ICE detention camp in Louisiana. But “just 10 days after his release, ICE seized Omar again and tried to whisk the still-recovering man onto a deportation flight,” said The Intercept. He was eventually released again following another court order.

‘Left me in shock’

The people being rearrested can experience lasting trauma. Yader Cortez of St. Cloud, Minnesota, was “on the cusp of securing U.S. residency” only to be “detained again just three minutes after a judge’s order freed him,” said MPR News. “He tells me, ‘You’re being arrested by ICE.’ I ask, ‘Why? The judge is letting me go free, isn’t he?’” Cortez told MPR of the official who rearrested him. “Then he said, ‘The judge doesn’t know what he’s doing. He made a mistake in your case.’”

“I had never experienced anything like that — going from being free to suddenly being imprisoned again,” Cortez added. “It left me in shock.” Lawyers say ICE often keeps people’s property even after they are released. The agency has “withheld government-issued identification documents,” said the ACLU of Washington, D.C., and some immigrants have “lost jobs, risked rearrest when leaving their homes and suffered significant hardship.”

Massive Democratic midterm wins have observers wondering about the U.S.’s relationship with Israel. The nation once had bipartisan U.S. support, but many Democrats newly elected to Congress ran on a platform of shrinking its lobbying influence. With Israel also being rocked by electoral changes, the relationship may never be the same.

What did the commentators say?

Republican midterm losses have “only added to Israel’s growing sense of international isolation after years of war,” said The New York Times. Billions of dollars in aid to Israel could now potentially dry up, considering “how far traditional support for Israel has fallen.” Critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who is fighting to keep power in his own country amid an opposing coalition effort to oust him — have “seized on the results” of the U.S. election as “proof of his mishandling of Israel’s national security interests.”

As Democrats prepare to take congressional control, Israel will “become a litmus test” for a party in which “only 13% have a positive view” of the country, said Bloomberg, citing a March NBC News poll. The incoming surge of pro-Palestine politicians in Congress will likely push to limit cooperation with the nation. “Legislation restricting U.S. arms transfers is unlikely to become law under Trump,” but shifting public sentiment “could eventually translate into policy that would limit Israel’s access to munitions and expose it to broader sanctions.”

Trump’s recent pledge to end aid to Israel was “condemned across the board,” said The Guardian. Pro-Palestinian advocates dismissed the move as “‘desperate’ and pro-Israel ones as ‘unserious.’”

What next?

The “future of U.S. policy toward Israel rides heavily on who will lead the country next,” said The Christian Science Monitor. And “come January,” said The Guardian, the House will “include an army doctor who went on a medical mission in Gaza, a lawyer who was fired by her firm over a blog post criticizing Israel’s war, a Jewish lawmaker who was recently detained by Israeli forces while helping Palestinians harvest olives in the occupied West Bank, and a community organizer who participated in a pro-Palestine student encampment.” Of course, this still “does not mean that the Democratic party is unified on Israel and Palestine.”

Just 24 hours after his party’s midterm drubbing, Vice President JD Vance offered a pointed diagnosis of why MAGA lost: frustration over the Iran war. Despite couching his critique with brief genuflections toward Trump, Vance’s lengthy missive about why Republicans lost, shared yesterday on X, has been taken by some as a deliberate schism point between himself and the administration he ostensibly helps lead. With two years left of the Trump White House and a presumptive presidential run of his own after that, Vance seems set on not allowing this week’s losses to limit his political future.

‘Astonishing, if implicit, rebuke’

Vance’s statement represents a “striking acknowledgment” from a sitting vice president that his own administration’s “handling” of the Iran war has “become a political liability for Republicans,” said Politico, even as Trump himself has “defended the approach.” The “blunt assessment” comes as “speculation mounts over his own political future,” said Fox News. Vance’s remarks signify a “shift in his public assessment of the war’s consequences” after “previously defending aspects of the administration’s military campaign.”

While Vance had “expressed some reluctance” in the early days of Trump’s Iran war plans, the vice president ultimately embraced the “spineless sycophantism we’ve come to expect,” said The New Republic. After the Democrats’ seismic midterm performance, however, Vance “promptly threw the president under the bus.” The veep’s “astonishing, if implicit, rebuke” of a president he has backed “consistently and unequivocally for years” suggests the GOP is entering an era of “competing factions” that “more openly jockey for influence,” said HuffPost.

‘Better late than never’

Trump detractors have “delighted in watching the infighting,” said Mediaite. Some Republicans have already embraced Vance’s pivot, including outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a frequent critic of Trump’s foreign policy. “Better late than never,” said Massie, asserting he had been “right about everything” in response to Vance’s post on X.

When asked about whether the Iran war should be blamed for Republicans’ loss in the midterms, Trump “essentially agreed with Vance,” said HuffPost. Vance’s critique is “largely true” because the war “drove the gasoline up a little,” said Trump to reporters, per The Associated Press. However, he added, “if I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again.”

Republicans are losing control of Congress. But not quite yet: The Democratic victors in Tuesday’s races do not take office until January, and President Donald Trump wants lame-duck legislators to pass his proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget in the remaining weeks his party has leverage on Capitol Hill. Some of his GOP allies, grumpy about the election results and Trump’s overtures to Russia, may not play along.

What did the commentators say?

A “handful of defections” by GOP defense hawks could “jeopardize Trump’s entire defense agenda,” said Politico. Some members of the president’s party are unhappy with his choice to allow Russian fuel sales and waive sanctions on Vladimir Putin’s regime, and they still want answers about the recent throttling of Starlink access to Ukraine. Trump “can’t even see Russia as our adversary,” said outgoing Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) to the outlet. “Why do I want to fund his agenda?”

The “growing pushback” extends to Trump’s staunchest allies, said Reuters. Putin “cannot be trusted,” and there could be “unintended consequences” from sanctions relief, said House Speaker Mike Johnson to Fox News before the election. Several House and Senate Republicans signed October letters objecting to the diesel and sanctions decisions. Their frustration could “pose new hurdles” for the president’s defense and spending bills during the lame-duck session, Reuters said.

Outgoing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), an occasional Trump antagonist, might be the most notable opponent. Passing the defense bill will require the support of Republicans “who know the difference between the good guys and the bad guys,” said McConnell at The Wall Street Journal. Trump should “plan accordingly” and end the “obeisance to Mr. Putin.”

What next?

Trump’s lame-duck agenda will “run into a brick wall” if defeated GOP incumbents decide to play hooky during their final weeks in office, said The Hill. Defeated candidates often “lose their appetite to stick around Washington” during the last weeks of their term. Some of those candidates will also “blame Trump on election results, and that will factor in,” Bacon said to the outlet.

“We will kill Trump,” says a huge new billboard in central Tehran. There is a “good degree of triumphalism” inside Iran at the results of the US midterms, said Patrick Wintour, diplomatic editor of The Guardian. But supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei has warned those expecting an immediate shift in American policy towards Iran that they are “seriously mistaken”.

Donald Trump will soon face pressure on military spending from a Democrat-controlled Congress. But, in the two months before the new Congress convenes, “he has greater latitude and little accountability”. The president has paid a high “political price” for his war with Iran, and, “having come so far”, he may look to “cement his legacy and finish the job”.

What did the commentators say?

Trump will not “go gentle into the political twilight of his career”, said the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen. Despite his drubbing at the ballot box, “he retains broad powers to use America’s military might”, and his “determination never to be seen” as a loser might tempt him to “blot out the electoral rout” by taking action abroad.

The new Congress will curb Trump’s “sledgehammer” approach to diplomacy, said Foreign Policy. The Democrats may not “get their way” completely but “the power of the purse will grant them considerable influence and negotiating power”. They could also “use their new oversight authorities” to hold hearings on the Iran war. If these are navigated shrewdly, any mistakes Trump makes in Iran could be weaponised as a “line of political attack” stretching to the 2028 presidential election.

“The president had been planning with Israel a new offensive after the midterm elections,” said Samer Al-Atrush, The Times’ Middle East correspondent. But such is the “historic drop in support for Israel” among US voters, that, even before the elections, Trump suggested he might soon “scale back American aid to Israel”. Key US ally Saudi Arabia will be “alarmed” by the Democrat triumphs and other Gulf nations that “initially opposed the war” will “welcome the moderating influence of an opposition-led Congress”.

But Trump “is peevish”, said Sam Kiley, The Independent’s world affairs editor. “His will has been thwarted, and his administration has been humiliated by Iran’s defiant resilience.” He will blame Iran’s survival, not his own actions, for “the spike in fossil fuel prices”. And if the world sees Iran as some “plucky underdog”, he “will want to shoot that animal”.

What next?

“All of Trump’s options are problematic,” said Axios. He could launch further strikes but going back to war would keep fuel prices high and be “highly unpopular”. Negotiation could be dogged by Iran, “sensing weakness”, refusing to make concessions, meaning Trump will have a “hard time reaching a deal”. He could continue to “strangle” Iran with naval blockades and sanctions but that “could take months to show progress”. The bottom line is: “there’s no tidy way for Trump to ‘finish the job’”.

Americans woke up to a decidedly bluer map this morning, as sweeping Democrat victories in Kansas, Texas and beyond dramatically realigned the country’s electoral makeup. With Congress soon to be under Democratic control, Republicans face a potential end to an era defined — and perhaps doomed — by President Donald Trump.

What did the commentators say?

After imploring voters “not once, not twice, but 47 times this fall” to act as if he himself were on the ballot, Trump got his wish, said Peter Baker at The New York Times. “Just not the way he hoped.” That Democrats won as decisively as they did suggests the country is “signaling the beginning of the end of the Trump era.”

There is “something bigger than the misadventures” of any one Republican candidate at play, said John Kennith White at The Hill. The “stench of political death has repelled even Trump’s most devoted followers,” as voters demand an “end to the anything-goes rhetoric” in favor of “leaders they can admire.”

GOP hopes that Trump’s previous victories were a “political realignment grounded in expanded support” from “working-class minority voters” have been “reduced to rubble,” said Ronald Brownstein at Bloomberg. The electoral “drubbing” also “exposed some cracks in the core MAGA coalition” of white men who did not attend college and rural voters that has “sustained Trump since 2016.”

Trump, “like lots of populists,” forgot the “economic bit of populism,” said Janan Ganesh at the Financial Times. That lapse made it “hard to distinguish him from a laissez-faire Republican of yesteryear.” A “voter rebellion” against Republicans could “force conservatives to rethink their undying allegiance” to the “80-year-old lame-duck leader,” said Steve Peoples at The Associated Press. Before polls closed Tuesday, some GOP candidates had already “begun to distance themselves from him.” These midterms mark the “beginning of a high-stakes fight” over the United States’ “political future in the twilight of the Trump era.”

What next?

How Trump responds to the midterm results will “shape the GOP’s fate,” not only for the remainder of his term but in the 2028 race to succeed him, said Bloomberg. While “Trumpism may be receding,” said the Times, its namesake has the “power of the presidency for two more years.” Trump may do “everything he can to remain a dominant voice for as long as he can.”

The blue tsunami many polls predicted came to pass Tuesday as Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress. Now, Democratic politicians are debating how to handle the upcoming GOP minority. Some want to work together with Republicans, while others say investigating the GOP and stonewalling President Donald Trump should be top of mind.

‘Lawyer up’

Many Democrats seem eager to “fight on nearly every front the president has opened,” said Nik Popli and Julia Terruso at Time. The incoming Democratic leadership is seemingly “preparing a legislative offensive aimed at reversing some of the administration’s most unpopular policies.”

Republicans should “lawyer up,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement. Democrats may “use their new subpoena power and agenda-setting authority” to investigate alleged corruption among Trump’s family, alongside setting up probes into “Elon Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency” and the “Department of Homeland Security’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics,” said Chris Marquette at Politico.

The party is most likely to “achieve lasting gains through sustained oversight investigations directed toward two goals,” Claire Finkelstein said at The Guardian: “providing accountability in the executive branch and strengthening the institution of Congress itself.”

Not after ‘political retribution’

Other Democrats, including some who will be taking up new jobs soon, feel that focusing on Trump is the wrong approach. “They didn’t send us to Washington for political retribution,” Sen.-elect James Talarico (D-Texas) told CNN after his victory. “They sent us to Washington to lower costs, to root out corruption, to get this economy back on track.” While there will be investigations, Democrats are “focused on delivering on the affordability agenda,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told NPR.

More moderate Democrats, including the likely next House speaker, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), are also “expected to be scared of a handful of new members aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America,” said The Washington Post editorial board. While the threat of democratic socialists “might discourage” centrists like Jeffries or Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer from “negotiating in good faith,” there is also a “strong case for unexpected levels of cooperation, or at least compromise, over the next two years.” Americans voted for divided government, but that “doesn’t mean they chose paralysis in the face of an impending fiscal emergency.”

Republicans facing a likely electoral blowout in today’s midterms are looking ahead to a very different election. It is one that will determine who leads the party through a new term as the likely minority in one, if not both, chambers of Congress. While current Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has signaled he intends to stay on as party leader, other Republican aspirants are eyeing the midterms as an opportunity to move up the leadership ladder.

What did the commentators say?

There is a “shadow election battle” now “quietly underway” among Republicans to lead “what is expected to be a diminished House Republican Conference,” said Politico. Speaker Johnson’s “recent hints that he intends to remain GOP leader” have “rattled the party’s leadership outlook,” said The Hill. The prospect of Johnson remaining in party leadership has prompted “fresh new questions” about the GOP’s place in the coming Congress, as most House speakers during the modern era have “stepped out of Congress after losing the gavel.”

“Most” Republicans expect Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Steve Scalise (R-La.) to “make a play for minority leader,” said Semafor. But both lawmakers have “publicly refused to entertain questions” about a potential leadership fight “on the record,” said The Washington Post. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), current GOP caucus whip, has also been “floated as a potential minority leader,” though he said he “plans on running for whip again next Congress.”

Johnson staying on as party leader is “not out of the realm of the possibility,” as members of his caucus “like him,” said one GOP insider to the Post. “Alas,” said Puck. What was once shaping up to be a “clear-cut race between Scalise and Jordan,” Republican leaders with “opposing styles and vastly different strengths and coalitions,” might now become a “three-way battle.”

What next?

The “size and ideological makeup” of the post-midterms GOP conference will be “key factors” in any leadership race, said Puck. “Heavy losses” that “obliterate moderates representing swing districts” would place the GOP in a “smaller but more conservative minority.”

US voters head to the polls today for midterm elections billed as a referendum on Donald Trump, even though the president’s name will not appear on a single ballot.

Up for grabs are all 435 seats in the lower house of Congress – the House of Representatives, where the Democrats expect to secure a majority – as well as 35 out of the 100 seats in the Senate, where the competition is predicted to be far closer.

Democrats would need to win four of seven Senate races deemed to be a “toss-up” by independent elections analyst The Cook Political Report to give them control of Congress, and with it “the power to limit Trump’s ambitions, reject his judicial nominations and investigate his administration”, said the BBC. Here are the races to watch:

Michigan

Probably the most hard-fought and vitriolic Senate race in this election cycle. Republicans have tried to paint Democrat candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a socialist and an Islamic extremist with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Polls have remained neck-and-neck but a late shock endorsement for Republican challenger Mike Rogers by Haley Stevens, who lost the Democratic primary to El-Sayed, could have a decisive impact. Crucially, this is one of the few toss-up Senate seats currently held by the Democrats, and winning it back would be a boost to Republican hopes of clinging on to a majority in Congress.

Alaska

Democrat candidate Mary Peltola, the first Indigenous Alaskan to be elected to the House of Representatives, has campaigned for the Senate on a platform of “fish, family, freedom” to come within touching distance of flipping the Republican seat.

While Alaska’s ranked-choice system has historically made it harder for pollsters to predict the winner, the election campaign has also been marred by controversy and accusations of dirty tricks with the appearance of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot. One is the incumbent Republican senator, the other a retired teacher with no prior political experience, sparking claims he had been induced to run by the senator’s opponents in the hopes of confusing voters.

Texas

The Lone Star state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly 40 years, but polls show rising star James Talarico is in with a fighting chance. At more than half a billion dollars and counting, it is the most expensive Senate race in US history, with Republican challenger and arch-Trump loyalist Attorney General Ken Paxton trying to paint his opponent – who once suggested God was non-binary – as far-left on culture issues. But Talarico, a 37-year-old former teacher who studied to be a Christian minister, has nonetheless managed to cut through with voters in the traditionally deep-red Republican stronghold.

Kansas

Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, but rising farming and fuel costs linked to Trump’s war in Iran, as well as the impact of the president’s immigration crackdown on rural businesses, means the state is unexpectedly up for grabs. The Democrats have also benefited from picking charismatic Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton as their candidate in a state with a large evangelical and mainline Protestant population. The latest polls show him narrowly ahead of incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall in what would be a hugely symbolic gain for the Democrats.

Adolf Hitler’s Alpine retreat has been burnt down in a suspected arson attack and German authorities now have a dilemma: rebuild it or not?

The Kehlsteinhaus, known in English as the Eagle’s Nest, perched 6,000ft up on an Alpine peak. It was built in 1938 to host – and impress – visiting dignitaries. Unlike the vast majority of Nazi monuments, it survived the war and its aftermath, and became a popular landmark and tourist spot – until last month, when an apparently deliberate blaze almost completely destroyed it.

‘Shrine for neo-Nazis’

The Eagle’s Nest was part of Obersalzberg, a Bavarian mountainside retreat that also included Hitler’s holiday home, the Berghof. After the Second World War, the Bavarian state government “wanted to raze Hitler’s favoured hideaway” but “local officials made the case to keep it going, at least in part”, said The Observer. The views are spectacular and there’s a “polished brass” lift to take you up there. “Tourism is tourism after all.”

The Eagle’s Nest official website calls the building “an architectural masterpiece” but it must “not be forgotten” that it was “intended to overshadow all the horrors of those years” and the “inhuman dictatorship it served”.

Now, the fire has “reignited difficult questions regarding the future of the mountaintop site”, said Smithsonian Magazine. Debate is raging about “whether, and how, to rebuild at the toxic site for the next generation of visitors, while mitigating the never-quite-banished risk of creating a shrine for neo-Nazis”, said The Guardian. It’s a fraught question, “particularly given the resurgence of the far right in Germany and in Europe more broadly”.

‘A sensible solution’

Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, has pledged that the state will consult with historians, local authorities and preservationists to find a “sensible solution” that would “continue to do the work of remembrance”.

Keeping it open to the public would promote “transparency”, while keeping it fenced off would encourage “rumour and legends”, Sven Keller of the Obersalzberg Documentation Centre told The Guardian. And leaving the Eagle’s Nest as a ruin would only make it “even more fascinating” to unwanted pilgrims. “We should find ways to integrate” what remains after the fire with “new information and education”: “the fire added a new layer” to its history.

Others, including Nazi-era historian Felix Bohr, oppose any rebuilding work at all. “Hitler’s megalomania should remain a ruin,” he told the paper. Our focus should be on “coming to terms with Nazi ideology, not restoring its stage sets”.

“For many, Germany has become a model for dealing with the legacies of dictatorship, war and genocide,” historian Gerald Steinacher, an expert on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, told The Christian Science Monitor. But, as this debate over the Eagle’s Nest shows, “how best to deal with Nazi buildings and sites remains an ongoing struggle”.

“I’ve never seen a viler ad,” said David French in The New York Times. Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP candidate for governor of Ohio, confirmed recently that his campaign was behind a truly despicable spot attacking his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton. The ad features Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, who calls her daughter a “liar” and insinuates she has mental health issues. What Arthur doesn’t mention is that she lost custody of her children after their stepfather was indicted in 1978 for raping the 12-year-old Acton; Arthur joined her husband when he fled the jurisdiction rather than face trial. If Ramaswamy had “a molecule of decency,” he’d pull the ad and apologize for “wielding that evil mother as a weapon against her own daughter.” But we learned long ago “that there is no bottom for MAGA,” so Ramaswamy instead defended his smear tactics—saying they were needed because Acton “won’t debate me”— and threw $4 million in funding behind the ad.

“The blowback was instantaneous,” said Paul Waldman in Public Notice. As well as Democrats, “one Republican after another” criticized Ramaswamy for deploying Acton’s “alleged child-rapist-defending mother,” including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Ohio Sen. Jon Husted— the latter of whom is locked in a tight midterms race. As the toxic fallout from the ad spread, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved the gubernatorial contest from “toss-up” to “Lean Democrat.” Still, Ramaswamy did secure the support of “the two most powerful Republicans in America.” Vice President JD Vance said he was “disgusted” by Republican “whining,” while President Trump said he wished the mothers of his opponents had been as “brave” as Arthur. That Ramaswamy has ended up in this mess is no surprise. Trump has remade the GOP in his own image: “cruel, vulgar, often hateful.” But most politicians, including Vance and Ramaswamy, lack the “dark power” that Trump possesses and instead come across as “atrocious jerks” when they try to emulate him.

As well as being in terrible taste, this ad was terrible politics, said Erika D. Smith in Bloomberg. Ramaswamy chose to essentially “ally himself with the ally of an alleged pedophile” at a time when 75% of Americans believe the Trump administration has been protecting the wealthy pals of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. We’ll soon see if this ugly gamble pays off for Ramaswamy, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. The repugnant ad should permanently shatter his political ambitions. But if he wins on election day, the video will likely be framed as a “career-maker.” And “he’ll have confirmed post-liberalism’s central thesis—that the key to political success is unabashed ruthlessness.”

What happened

President Trump escalated his attacks on the midterms voting process in several states recently, as his administration appeared to be setting the stage to cast doubt on the validity of widely anticipated Democratic wins. The Justice Department sued to block Alaskan election officials from declaring a winner in the Senate race unless it was Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, arguing that voters would be confused by the presence of a candidate with a nearly identical name, Dan J. Sullivan. Alaska uses a ranked-choice voting system, and Republicans argued the other Sullivan was planted to siphon votes away from the incumbent in favor of Democrat Mary Peltola. Alaska’s Supreme Court already permitted both Sullivans to remain on the ballot. Trump took personal credit for bringing the suit, telling reporters, “I’m the one who said do it.”

Meanwhile, a judicial panel in California rejected a last-ditch request from the Trump administration to set aside as many as 20,000 mail-in ballots from people it claims could be noncitizens. The panel noted that the timing would interfere with California’s ability to administer elections. The Justice Department also sent a letter demanding the segregation of any ballots submitted by 400 more alleged noncitizens in Washington, one of nine states where the Department of Homeland Security has recently conducted door-to-door searches for illegal voters. District Judge Araceli Martínez- Olguín blocked that effort as well, noting inaccuracies in the Justice Department’s list and the risk of giving U.S. citizens “ objectively reasonable” fears of prosecution.

What the columnists said

The Alaska lawsuit is “genuinely bizarre,” said Harry Litman in The New Republic. The Constitution clearly grants states the power to administer elections. The federal government “has no role” in trying to pre-emptively minimize confusion over “something that hasn’t happened and may never happen.” It’s “positively Looney Tunes.” The presence of same-named candidates may be a “pretty crafty” Democratic ploy, but it’s perfectly legal. Yet now, if Peltola wins, “Team Trump will have its talking point ready.

Trump’s administration has also been making “near-daily announcements” about people charged with noncitizen voting, said Kyle Cheney and Myah Ward in Politico, but the claims of sweeping voter fraud are nonsense. When Los Angeles County officials reviewed a 200-name sample of the 20,000 alleged illegal voters, they found 112 had not been sent ballots, more than 70% never voted in California, and nearly 40% of those with listed birthplaces were born in the U.S. Of course, this may not be about catching criminals, but rather “stoking the fire of distrust.”

These efforts might fizzle if the Democrats “win big,” said Stephen Collinson in CNN.com. But if Republicans lose by tight margins, we could see weeks-long battles over certifying the results. And there’s no Bill Barr equivalent “to debunk potential claims of fraud.” Trump said recently he would accept the results “if they are honest elections.” That ominous caveat is now “impossible to ignore.”

After months of fiercely fought campaigns across the country, the 2026 midterms are finally here. Have Democrats convinced voters to send them to Washington as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s MAGA government? While early election data shows Democrats in a strong position to capture one, if not both, chambers of Congress, nothing is set in stone until polls close tomorrow night.

‘Huge chance’ but ‘still not 100%’

A “wave of new polls” could “point to just that” for Democrats, said anchor John Berman on CNN: “a wave.” If polling from The New York Times and Siena bears out on election day, Democrats will “take the Senate with room to spare.”

Data showing Democrats nine points up on Republicans is “important” because that “easily overcomes GOP redistricting,” said CNN’s Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten on “The Enten Scale.” Although Enten placed odds of the Democrats taking the House at more than 90%, he said Democrats have just 72% odds of flipping the Senate — a “huge chance” but “still not 100%.” The GOP’s 29% likelihood of keeping the Senate “ain’t nothing.”

Democratic advantages have allowed candidates to play in races Republicans “thought were unreachable,” said Fox News. But “only to the point of making them battlegrounds.”

‘Inherently imprecise’ but usually ‘in the ballpark’

The media “just can’t let go of their obsession with polls” in an election “dominated by ‘horse race’ reporting,” said USA Today. “Breathless updates” about single-point shifts in certain races presume “such statistical noise actually matters.” But while polls are “inherently imprecise” and subject to “many sources of error,” you can trust them to “usually be in the ballpark,” said pollster Nate Cohn at The New York Times.

Early voting impact

Democrats are “flexing their early voting strength,” said The Guardian, having cast 43% of early votes compared to Republicans’ 31%. The “overall picture” of early vote trends “offers few positives for Republicans,” said the Times, affording observers “clues about which subgroups are turning out.” Still, the “impact” of the early votes will ultimately “be known only after polls close.”

With Republicans clinging to power against a flurry of polls that predict a blue wave during this week’s elections, an additional foe could spell trouble for the GOP: libertarians. Some believe a roster of Libertarian candidates could ruin Republicans’ best chances during the midterms.

‘Could lead some conservatives to cast protest ballots’

While many analysts say the GOP’s efforts are futile due to nationwide frustration with the Trump administration, there are numerous battleground states in play. But “unhappiness with President Donald Trump could lead some conservatives to cast protest ballots,” said Thomas Beaumont at The Associated Press. Some voters may be swayed to vote Libertarian, a party which runs on a “message of nonintervention and limited centralized authority.” The party “could draw enough votes to affect the outcome in a number of these races,” GOP former Ohio state lawmaker Gene Krebs told the AP.

Three key states include Iowa, Kansas and Texas. Libertarians there are “polling in the low single digits, but their appeal to disaffected Republican voters could prove decisive in races with little separating the major-party contenders,” Sarah Fortinsky said at The Hill. Texas may end up the most prominent example, where Libertarian candidate Ted Brown “offers Republicans wary of Paxton an alternative to both their scandal-ridden Senate nominee and Democrat James Talarico.”

‘Boosting third party spoilers is a bipartisan sport’

Even as Republican strategists are worried, others think the Libertarian Party could hurt Democrats in a similar manner. In U.S. politics, “boosting third party spoilers is a bipartisan sport,” said Isaac Arnsdorf, Mariana Alfaro and Erin Cox at The Washington Post. In “Pennsylvania, Michigan and Virginia battleground races, independents and Green candidates have popped up as left-wing alternatives to Democrats,” even as “social media and voter registration history show them as supporters of President Donald Trump.”

Overall, the “big question is not just how much of the vote Libertarian candidates will win in these contests” but also whether Democratic PACs spent enough money “in support of those Libertarian candidates,” said Lauren Egan at The Bulwark. While it “can be a risky and controversial tactic, promoting third-party spoiler candidates is not without precedent.”

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected to water down plans to double the length of time foreign workers must wait before they are eligible to settle permanently in the UK following opposition from within the Labour Party.

As originally laid out in November 2025, the proposals would extend the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) from five to 10 years. The lowest-paid workers, including many employed in the care sector, faced an even longer wait, of 15 years. Adding yet more controversy, the changes would apply to migrants already in the UK. Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, said making the rules apply retrospectively was “un-British” while Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh called for more “compassion” in migration policy.

As Mahmood prepares to unveil her revised plans, the prime minister and home secretary are maintaining a united front, said John Rentoul in The Independent, “but we do not yet know what it is that they are united on”.

What did the commentators say?

“Mahmood is tying herself in a large and unedifying knot,” said James O’Brien in The i Paper. Moving the goalposts for overseas migrants already here is a “breach of the metaphorical contract” and sends an “ugly” message that such workers are “irreversibly second class”. By making settlement harder for vital care workers in particular – who do work British nationals consider “beneath them or too poorly paid” – Mahmood would show she been influenced by “immigration rhetoric as opposed to immigration reality”. She is “pandering to feelings built on lies”.

It would be a “grave error” for Mahmood to change her original plans, said The Telegraph in an editorial. The situation Labour finds itself in is “depressingly familiar”: the government insists it supports border controls, but objects to policies to secure them. Indeed, Mahmood may be forced to “retreat” from the “necessary” changes to ILR to regain backbench support. But she must break free from this “Faustian pact. She was right the first time round.”

Given the backlash, the Home Office could compromise by changing the rules only for new arrivals. But that would be “defeating the entire purpose of the reforms”, said David Shipley in The Spectator, which was mitigating the impact of the “ruinous” so-called “Boriswave” of immigrants.

What next?

“The exact shape of the compromise has been fought over for months,” said Rentoul in The Independent. By now, Burnham and Mahmood will have “calculated where to draw the line so that they can be sure that they have a solid majority of Labour MPs behind them”.

Burnham runs a better “ego management programme” with Labour backbenchers than Keir Starmer, and so is unlikely to have a repeat of last year’s backlash over welfare reforms.

The government will also benefit from a divided opposition on the right. As architects of the Boriswave, any Conservative criticism of Mahmood’s plan will sound hypocritical, while Reform UK “is finding it increasingly hard” to compete with Restore’s more extreme positions on immigration.

“There’s a decency we should expect out of our public officials,” said former President Barack Obama at a recent campaign rally condemning Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s now-infamous attack ad against Democrat Amy Acton. Ramaswamy’s commercial shows there is “no line he will not cross, no low he will not sink to.” But while Obama’s comments were directed at Ramaswamy specifically, they come as the GOP grapples with a surging strain of Trumpian malice among arguably less adept candidates — to the chagrin of some within their own party.

‘Ethical degradation of Trumpism’

Ramaswamy’s “may be the most disgusting ad in American political history,” said Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times. But it has opened a “kind of proxy debate on the right” about whether the party should “reclaim some baseline morality” or pursue its “current smashmouth course.” The controversy surrounding the ad affords conservatives space to “reckon with the ethical degradation of Trumpism” without “quite admitting that that’s what they’re doing.” With “no ideas to run on” and minimal accomplishments to tout, GOP candidates “seem to have hatched a plan,” said Rex Huppke at USA Today: “Let’s just be the most wretched versions of ourselves” and “see how things shake out.”

It is “undoubtedly the case” that Trump himself enjoys “some special sauce” that makes him a “formidable general election candidate,” said Jamelle Bouie at the Times. But without candidates who enjoy that innate talent, Republicans are struggling to “mimic Trump’s particular style of politics” as successfully.

GOP ‘litmus test’

Trump is “reminding us on a daily basis that cruelty is the point,” said Charlie Sykes on his To the Contrary podcast. “That seems to be spreading.” In American politics, “bullies” do tend to prosper “for a bit,” said Times columnist David French to Sykes. But they then experience a “serious backlash.”

Ramaswamy’s ad has become a “litmus test” for “how deep” into MAGA’s “post-truth nihilism” someone might sink,” said Rolling Stone. Republican discomfort with Trumpian insolence misses the “greater point” of the “political movement” that led to its creation: The “conservative project’s greatest strength is its moral flexibility.” By that metric, the party’s future is “still firmly in Trump’s hands.”

Bougainville could soon become the world’s newest nation, three decades after a brutal civil war, and seven years since the resource-rich islands overwhelmingly voted to secede from Papua New Guinea.

Parliamentarians in Papua New Guinea will vote next month on whether to grant independence to the autonomous and ethnically distinct islands that are home to around 350,000 people.

Civil war to referendum

After decades of being controlled by colonising nations as various as Germany, Australia and Japan, Bougainville first declared its independence – as the Republic of the North Solomons – in 1975. Within weeks, however, it was incorporated into the newly independent nation of Papua New Guinea.

In the years that followed, the islands’ politics, and push for greater autonomy, became inextricably linked to its vast Panguna copper and gold mine. Anger that less than 2% of the wealth generated by the internationally run concession went to the local community “spiralled into a decade-long civil war in the main island’s jungles, as a rag-tag separatist militia held Papua New Guinea’s military at bay”, said The New York Times.

“The Crisis”, as it is now known, lasted from 1988 to 1998, and “left as many as 15,000 people dead, and displaced a generation, while cementing Bougainville’s desires for independence”.

A peace agreement in 2001 formally brought fighting to an end. It established a measure of autonomy for Bougainville and, crucially, a commitment from Papua New Guinea to allow an independence referendum. This was held in 2019, and 97.7% of Bougainvilleans voted for independence. Under the terms of the peace agreement, and the constitution, the result must be ratified by Papua New Guinea’s parliament in Port Moresby before it can take effect.

Economic self-reliance

Port Moresby has “long resisted acting on Bougainville’s post-conflict independence”, said The Guardian. The government is keen “not to establish a precedent for the break-up of Papua New Guinea’s vast and culturally diverse archipelago, or to lose a resource-rich and potentially lucrative province”.

Parliament is slated to begin voting on the issue on 24 November. But, after the threshold for ratification was raised from the usual two-thirds to three-quarters of all MPs, Bougainville’s Attorney General, Ezekiel Masatt, denounced the “national government strategy to poison the waters and make it impossible to come close to reach the voting threshold”.

Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape has argued that Bougainville does not have the economic resources to be able to stand on its own feet. He has mooted the idea of “allowing for a period of time in which the region works on developing that economic self-reliance before the parliament might then revisit the question of political independence”, said Radio New Zealand.

Many Bougainvilleans think that the route to economic self-reliance lies in “rehabilitating” the Panguna copper mine, which was closed by multiple acts of sabotage in 1989. Bougainville’s President Ishmael Toroama is already pursuing the redevelopment of Panguna, and has signalled his intention to “separate from the state of Papua New Guinea” in 2030, regardless of whether Port Moresby ratifies Bougainville’s independence or not.

Republicans have dominated Southern politics for more than a generation, but that supremacy is being challenged in this year’s midterms. Democratic candidates are making an unexpectedly strong push for Senate seats in places like South Carolina and Mississippi.

Driven by a ‘backlash’

Democrats’ “stealthy advance into the South” during the midterms “could end up being the story of the year,” said Damian Paletta at The Wall Street Journal. The GOP’s concern can be seen in President Donald Trump’s appearances in states such as South Carolina and Texas to campaign for handpicked candidates like Darline Graham and Ken Paxton, who find themselves in toss-up races. Those are locales that national Republicans usually take for granted. “What. On. Earth. Is. Going. On?”

Republicans may be a victim of their own success. Early voting in Southern states is being driven by a “backlash” against last spring’s Trump-led effort — enabled by April’s Supreme Court decision undermining the Voting Rights Act — to “gerrymander Black voters” into GOP-dominated congressional districts, said Bloomberg.

Florida’s Black voters are casting in-person early ballots in double the numbers they did in 2022. Similar trends have been observed in North Carolina and Georgia. Black voter anger could “fuel a Democratic turnout advantage” that decides races “throughout the South, from North Carolina to Texas,” said Bloomberg.

“America’s new political battleground is the South,” said Carolyn Hugley and Lauren Groh-Wargo at Democracy Docket. The gerrymandering push compelled Democratic organizers to “mobilize quickly” and “force politicians to reconsider what they believed they could get away with.” The fight for “fair representation for Black Americans” is inseparable from efforts to “break the GOP’s stranglehold on the region.”

‘Barely enough’

Some leaders worry Democrats were unprepared for this opportunity. The party “made mistakes in not investing earlier” in races across the South, said Gov. Wes Moore (D-Md.) on ABC’s “This Week.” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) agrees. Democrats have done “barely enough” to win the region, he said to MS NOW. The party cannot afford to write off voters south of the Mason-Dixon Line. “As goes the South, so goes the nation.”

Arab parties could reshape the political landscape of Israel after securing a record number of seats in Tuesday’s bitterly fought election. The left-wing Joint List, which includes Hadash, Balad and Ta'al, alongside the socially conservative Ra’am party led by Mansour Abbas, are on course for 18 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

With neither Benjamin Netanyahu or his main rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, close to securing a majority on their own, the Arab parties’ strong showing could make them “kingmakers”, said Liam Stack in The New York Times. “But building a governing coalition with Arab participation remains a fraught exercise in Israel.”

What did the commentators say?

Arab Israeli citizens make up around 20% of the country’s population, and at this election they have turned out in record numbers, driven by what Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh called “an existential moment for Palestinian-Israelis”.

Their success at the polls poses an “urgent and fundamental challenge to the country’s mainstream opposition: either cooperate with Arab Israelis or hand Benjamin Netanyahu a roadmap to political survival”, said Julian Borger in The Guardian.

While Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats party, hailed the results as an “opportunity to form a change government in partnership with Israel’s Arab citizens”, for the larger opposition parties, the picture is “less straightforward”, said The Washington Post. Their voters tend to “lean further right, and many have long rejected any government propped up by Arab lawmakers”.

Eisenkot has not explicitly ruled out working with the Arab parties but the conditions he has set for any party to join him are so stringent they may make any partnership impossible. Then there are the concessions the various Arab factions would demand in return for power-sharing. “Cooperation would have to survive those disagreements,” said Zvika Klein in The Jerusalem Post. “A shared interest in replacing a prime minister does not settle what comes afterwards.”

What next?

If no bloc secures the 61-seat threshold once the final result is announced, it falls to Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to decide who he asks first to try to form a government. They then have six weeks to cobble together a coalition, after which the challenge is passed on to the next option.

Although Netanyahu and Eisenkot are “unlikely to enter a formal coalition with Arab parties”, the record Arab turnout is still “significant”, said Nada AlTaher in The National.

With Netanyahu’s chances of forming a majority government all but over, he would be forced into putting together a unity government. This would have to include members of the opposition, potentially pushing extreme figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich out of a future cabinet.

It’s “not the outcome” Arab voters, or indeed those fundamentally opposed to Netanyahu staying in power, will have hoped for, said Danny Citrinowitz, from the Institute for National Security Studies, but it could at least force the PM towards a more moderate position.

Buoyed by polls showing historic winds at their backs ahead of next week’s midterms, Democrats are wasting little time preparing for the day they capture one, or both, chambers of Congress. For all the speculation about how the party might use a congressional majority to rein in the Trump administration, Democrats have also set their sights beyond the beltway on tech billionaire Elon Musk.

The party is threatening investigations during the new legislative term into the GOP megafunder’s businesses and previous government work. Musk, unsurprisingly, has threatened Democrats back, setting up a potential clash that could reverberate through Washington.

What did the commentators say?

Having “long eyed investigating the world’s richest man,” senior Democrats are “mulling how a range of panels could target Musk and a huge swath of his businesses,” said Politico. Even Democrats on committees with “less obvious ties to the tech mogul” are “eyeing targets.”

Musk’s recent interference in Ukrainian military operations is one of a “glut” of alleged conflicts of interest that the Democrats see as “ripe for oversight,” said Politico. But “above all else,” Democrats appear eager to “delve into the disaster” of his DOGE project, said Talking Points Memo.

Democrats should be wary of targeting a man whose three private companies are “almost single-handedly driving American power and influence and our military edge in the next century,” said Fox News host Jesse Watters on “The Five.” “You are gonna destroy that edge.”

In response to increased Democratic interest, Musk threatened to “find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets,” he said on X. “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

Musk’s “wartime posture” shows he’s “bracing for a fight,” said The Washington Post. And with days to go before polls close, he “continues to signal he’s readying a counteroffensive.”

What next?

Some Democrats are “not waiting for election results to get started” investigating Musk, said Politico. Members of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security in September demanded Musk testify on reports that his DOGE project “overstated its savings,” while the Ways and Means Committee in January called for probes into “alleged DOGE-related data theft” from programs like Social Security.

Corporate chiefs embraced President Donald Trump when he returned to the White House last year. Some wanted to avoid a crackdown, while others wanted to curry favor with the administration. Now, they are increasingly worried about consequences if Democrats take back control of Congress in November.

‘Holding Trump accountable’

Leading executives “fear a reckoning” after the midterms, said The Washington Post. Silicon Valley firms such as Meta, OpenAI and Palantir that “ingratiated themselves with Trump’s Washington” now anticipate a Democratic Congress that will scrutinize their dealings with the president. Companies tied to Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk are also expected to get a close look. Trump-aligned businesses have a “very rough couple years ahead,” said Democratic strategist Cooper Teboe to the outlet.

Corporate investigations could be Democrats’ “secret weapon for holding Trump accountable,” said Molly Claflin at MS NOW. For example, Chevron “gained the rights to vast oil reserves in Venezuela” after making “multimillion-dollar contributions” to presidential projects, while R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company made similar donations before the government lifted vaping restrictions. Democrats would be continuing a “long tradition” of delving into big businesses to “investigate government corruption.”

Democrats are “coming for the CEOs,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Private-sector officials “may not have liked writing checks for the inaugural or White House ballroom” but also had little choice “given how much leverage” Trump had over their businesses. Regardless, corporate America should “lawyer up.”

‘Perils of plutopopulism’

Democrats in Congress are split over “how hard to go after companies that courted the White House,” said Politico. “The corruption is everywhere,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to the outlet. Others would prefer to focus on affordability issues instead of “weaponizing the federal government,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto to Politico.

CEOs are now discovering the “perils of plutopopulism,” said Chrystia Freeland at the Financial Times. Businesses embraced Trump believing he would “deliver tax cuts and deregulation.” That bet is “starting to go wrong” now that the president’s “political star is shining less brightly.”

Israelis go to the polls today. It’s their first general election since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 led to war in Gaza. With opinion polls suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition is “neck and neck” with the main opposition bloc, this is a nation “deeply divided and ready for a fight”, said the BBC. Most Israelis see this election as “the most consequential in their country’s history”, said The Guardian.

What did the commentators say?

For Israelis in Netanyahu’s electoral strongholds, the prime minister is their “champion and protector against enemies across the region” and against a loathed “domestic ‘elite’ they perceive as undermining the will of the people” by succumbing to “international pressure to allow a Palestinian state”, said Neri Zilber in the Financial Times.

Elsewhere, the atmosphere is very different. On Saturday, thousands rallied in Tel Aviv to protest against Netanyahu’s government and call for an independent inquiry into the security failures that led to the 7 October Hamas attacks. “Taking part were leading figures from opposition parties, including Gadi Eisenkot,” said Al Jazeera. The Yashar party leader, and Netanyahu’s main centre-right rival, “was greeted by chants of ‘Who’s coming? The next prime minister’”.

Division has also arrived by air. As most Israelis living abroad are not allowed to vote by post, “expatriates need to cross oceans to cast their ballots”, said The Telegraph. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimates the number of citizens living abroad at 600,000, so the expat vote has the “potential to tip the scale”. There’s much talk “about the thousands coming home, determined to remove Netanyahu”, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator, “but thousands also are coming to keep him in office”.

The young will be a crucial voting demographic. More than 500,000 Israelis have reached voting age since the last election in 2022. This generation “came of age after the Oslo process collapsed” and were teenagers when the October 7 attacks occurred, said The Guardian. “Bucking global trends,” they “are more right-wing than older generations”.

What next?

The first exit polls will be published at 10pm local time (8pm in the UK) but neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor Eisenkot’s are projected to win the 61 seats needed to form a majority government. There’s likely to be weeks or months of political wrangling before any workable coalition government can be formed.

The “critical balance of power” will almost certainly be held by the two Arab-majority groupings, said the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Yolande Knell. Most of the other parties, including Eisenkot’s Yashar, have so far said they would not work with Arab parties, because of “a lack of shared values”. The Arab groupings are open to alliances but they have their own policy aims, not least a solution to “rampant gang crime”. In this high-stakes election, it’s “Arab citizens could yet decide who wields power in Israel, and they see this vote as key to their own future in the country”.

The midterm elections don’t take place solely on Nov. 3, said Chris Brennan in USA Today. With about 8 million votes cast early or by mail, they’re “already underway”— and so are President Trump’s “attempts to disrupt the process.” Insisting without evidence that voter fraud is widespread, his administration sued California recently to keep the state from counting the ballots of 20,000 voters it alleged are noncitizens. His Department of Homeland Security already tried claiming that 15,000 noncitizens were registered in Nevada; DHS later narrowed the list to 185—and Nevada then found all 185 were citizens. Trump has publicly stated elections were rigged or fraudulent on more than 70% of days since his return to office, and his claims are growing more desperate, with Democrats “poised to take control of Congress and bring oversight and accountability to his second term.

Local and state officials are now bracing “to defend their elections against what used to be a reliable ally”: the federal government, said Zolan Kanno-Youngs in The New York Times. Trump is falsely claiming voting machines can be rigged or hacked by foreign governments; earlier this year, the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized voting records from the 2020 election. The president’s most rabid supporters are “urging him to consider drastic actions,” such as declaring martial law. Motivated by “a growing sense of alarm,” about 10 current and former national security officials are “discreetly advising” states on how to prepare for election interference, said Noah Robertson in The Washington Post. Among the possible threats: deployment of troops or ICE to polling sites to scare away voters, the seizure of ballots or election machines, and threats to arrest and prosecute election officials.

But so far, “Trump’s election meddling lies mostly in ruins,” said David Ignatius, also in The Washington Post. He’s “failed in nearly every phase of his assault,” thanks to “determined legal resistance.” The Supreme Court blocked him from using the Postal Service to limit mail-in ballots. States keep refusing demands to hand over voter rolls. If Trump “were a batter in a baseball game, he would have struck out, over and over.” Hundreds of lawyers are working with Democrats “to prevent election sabotage,” but the best defense “is an anti-Trump turnout at the polls so large that even he can’t challenge it.”

A student-led protest movement has won the Serbian parliamentary elections, defeating Aleksandar Vučić, the strongman who has ruled the country for 14 years. “After toppling governments in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, and rattling others in India, Kenya, and Vietnam,” it seems Gen Z protests “have come for Europe”, said Judah Grunstein in World Politics Review.

The Student List – which has no obvious leaders and whose candidates were not politicians but academics, engineers, farmers and athletes – attracted voters angry at government fraud and corruption with the slogan “Serbia or Mafia?”.

Vučić threw “the kitchen sink at the campaign to skew the result his way”, including taking control of all Serbia’s broadcast channels, “cranking up the nationalist rhetoric” and “cultivating support from Moscow”, said veteran central Europe correspondent Misha Glenny in The Guardian. But he and his once-dominant Serbian Progressive party were beaten, in a result that will reverberate across European countries already rocked by their own student protests.

What did the commentators say?

“Protest movements always respond to local factors,” said Grunstein in World Politics Review. But the student grievances in Serbia “and their underlying causal factors” have “more than a passing similarity” to those in France, Spain and Italy: “educational systems starved of funding, a bleak employment outlook and scarce opportunities for housing”. And corruption “is often the trigger that catalyses anger over the rest”.

In Serbia, the catalyst was the 2024 collapse of newly renovated station roof in Novi Sad, killing 15 people. What started as weekly student protests against the corruption that allegedly lay behind the botched building project “soon became a national movement” that “encompassed far more sections of Serbian society, including farmers, actors and judges”, said the BBC’s Europe editor Paul Kirby.

When Vučić, “clearly shaken” by the scale of the protests, announced snap elections last month, the students made a “calculated decision” not to stand as candidates themselves “as the electorate would probably not voted for a list of candidates with little life experience”.

Instead, they “turned months of university sit-ins” and “anti-corruption marches into a serious parliamentary challenge” by hopping on bicycles, walking across the countryside and knocking on doors to build a 250-candidate campaign slate “unlike anything Serbia has seen”, said Noah Sanders on Geosirius.

The Student List successfully “transformed itself” from “social revolt into electoral legitimacy”, said Ljubiša Ivanović on Euronews. They were vilified by pro-government media but used their energy to attract voters across the country who were disillusioned with their local politicians. Their message, said The Associated Press, was “focused on a non-partisan effort to rebuild Serbia’s economy and restore its democracy”. This youth-led victory over an authoritarian leader echoes the recent defeat of Viktor Orbán, once Vučić’s staunch ally in Hungary.

What next?

“Winning an election is one thing; governing a country is another,” said Euronews’ Ivanović. Student List must now “formulate policies on the economy, foreign affairs, the European integration process, social policy and the rule of law”. Its newly elected parliamentarians, with little to no experience of governing, will be tasked with implementing an 11-point programme that includes purging ministries of officials linked to organised crime, “freeing” Serbia’s media and restoring transparency to public procurement.

“For years, Serbian politics revolved around one dominant question: whether a political force could challenge Vučić. The answer has now been given. It can.” But “the force that did it was not one of the established opposition parties, but a student movement” that’s only two years old. It’s a “political earthquake”.

Elon Musk has “learned to love political spending again,” said Chad de Guzman in Time. After splashing at least $250 million on getting President Trump back in the White House, the world’s richest man announced last year that he’d spend “a lot less” on future campaigns because “I’ve done enough.” Instead, he’s become the biggest single donor this midterm cycle. Since July, Musk has given at least $276 million to various Republican groups—$158 million of which went to the GOP’s main Senate super PAC, “one of the largest known political donations in history.” That infusion of cash allowed the super PAC to launch a $149 million ad campaign for Ken Paxton, the GOP’s struggling candidate in the Texas U.S. Senate race. Musk’s huge spend “isn’t surprising, given what’s at stake for him if Republicans lose.” Democrats have vowed to investigate the multibillion- dollar government contracts held by SpaceX, Tesla, and other Musk companies if they win the House—and to subpoena Musk over his role leading DOGE, which slashed hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and gutted foreign aid.

Musk has learned that candidates “want his money but not him,” said Jim Newell in Slate. Back in 2024 and 2025, he was everywhere: “prancing about onstage with Trump,” living at Mar-a-Lago, and handing out million- dollar checks to Wisconsin voters. This time, he’s confined himself to insulting Democrats on his social media platform X and making donations that, while eye- poppingly large, are “effectively less than couch change” for a man worth about $1 trillion. “That’s some intimidating profligacy,” said Noah Rothman in The Boston Globe. But Musk’s money will make a difference on Election Day only if his beneficiaries can pair it with a compelling message. As voters keep telling pollsters, “that’s the missing part of the GOP’s 2026 strategy.”

As “a prominent and powerful white supremacist,” Musk has his own message, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. On X, he traffics in extremist conspiracy theories about brown and Black “invaders” destroying “‘Western,’ meaning white, civilization.” He “heavily promoted” the movie Citizen Vigilante, in which the hero kills Arab and African immigrants. He supports “remigration,” the forced deportation of nonwhite citizens to their supposed countries of origin. Yet Republicans are allowed to pretend such rhetoric from the party’s “most important donor” is irrelevant to them, even while Democrats are often asked to denounce Hasan Piker, a popular but niche far-left streamer. “I think Republicans should have to answer” for Musk’s ugly views. And if Democrats win Congress this November, they should work to ensure that no one man will ever again “have all this power.”

What is the administration doing?

In a first in U.S. history, the government has separated tens of thousands of children from parents who were arrested on immigration violations, often deporting them without their kids. Many such parents entered the U.S. legally as asylum seekers and have been working and raising families while pursuing citizenship. This spring, the Brookings Institution counted more than 146,000 children who are U.S. citizens and have had a parent deported; more than 22,000 have had both parents deported. Sometimes deportees are given the option to take their children with them—but not always. When Physicians for Human Rights interviewed women deported to Honduras this year, they found that many had not been asked if they had children, while others simply had their kids taken. One was parted from her 2-month-old breastfeeding baby. Migrant advocates say the crisis mirrors 2018, when the first Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the southern border sparked an uproar. “It’s leading to all the same forms of trauma,” said Kelly Kribs, an attorney for immigrant children. “But the speed and the scale of the separations now is at a level we’ve never seen before.”

What happens to children left in the U.S.?

Many go to relatives or friends, but because deportees have little or no time to arrange for care, some end up in foster care. When Marlyn, a Venezuelan with a pending asylum application, landed in ICE detention after a traffic stop in Alabama, her two young children, including a 2-year-old just weaned, were left with her co- worker. When she chose to accept deportation rather than endure prolonged detention in a case likely to fail, she said she begged to have her children sent with her. “I told them, ‘I have no one to take care of them.’ But they never did anything.” Nearly a year later, Marlyn has been unable to arrange extradition for her toddler, who doesn’t recognize her in video calls. Some parents choose to leave their kids behind because they are returning to countries roiled by violence. One Haitian woman, identified by The Guardian only as L.T., made the wrenching decision to leave her sick baby with a grandmother, knowing that there wouldn’t be medical care in gang-plagued Haiti. Now she’s racked by fear that her daughter could wind up with strangers. “I’m terrified of losing my baby,” she said.

What does the law say?

The law allows for parents to be deported without their children, but until recently there were protections. ICE policy held that federal agents should avoid separating families and either deport them together or confirm a caregiver is in place. The Trump administration revised the policy to say agents should do that “when operationally feasible,” which advocates say gives ICE leeway to ignore it. The administration insists it doesn’t intentionally separate families, and that this only occurs when parents make the choice to self- deport. But critics say otherwise. ICE is intent on meeting its deportation quotas, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), even “if that means tearing families apart and traumatizing children.” Migrant advocates also cite a growing trend of children being taken from parents and put into federal custody.

Why is this happening?

Children of detainees are being reclassified as unaccompanied minors and sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. When Luis, a construction worker from Venezuela, was detained with his 11-year-old son, Andrés, after being arrested in El Paso, he said agents removed Andrés and transferred him to ORR instead of sending him to his grandfather. Case workers said Andrés couldn’t sleep in foster care and screamed for his parents at night. It’s not clear how common such reclassifications are, but Mother Jones spoke to a dozen lawyers who confirmed the trend. “They’re kidnapping people’s kids and keeping them in government custody,” said Jen Smyers, who was a Biden-era ORR official. There’s a process for applying to get them out, but the administration has made it arduous—to protect children from predators, it says—and ICE has arrested undocumented people who apply.

Are minors ever deported alone?

Frequently. An analysis by Pro Publica found that judges have issued over 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders for unaccompanied minors every month, a rate four times higher than in Trump’s first term. Most of these children came from Central American countries riven by violence and economic upheaval, have no criminal record, and are pursuing legal residence. Minors with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, granted to those who’ve suffered parental abuse or neglect, used to be protected from deportation, but the Trump administration ended that policy. It also ended $200 million in annual funding for the Acacia Center for Justice, a nonprofit that provides legal services to migrant children.

Has there been pushback?

Not much. Migrant advocates say there’s been a notable shift from 2018, when blowback over family separations led to legal challenges, bipartisan opposition, and an eventual climbdown. This time, there’s no explicit policy to challenge in court, and the separations are happening outside public view—no media images of children in cages. Advocates also cite less resistance within the administration, as staffers who might have objected have left or been laid off. The fallout in human trauma will be vast, experts say, especially for the youngest children. “They are left with a sense of abandonment that’s kind of imprinted,” said Michele Heisler, a doctor with Physicians for Human Rights. Her organization also documented signs of trauma among separated mothers, including panic attacks and uncontrollable crying. The “gratuitous level of cruelty,” she said, “is hard for all of us to understand.

South Asian Americans report facing rhetorical and physical attacks, egged on by right-wing politicians and intellectuals. The latter are debating the so-called Indian question of whether ethnic minorities can truly assimilate into the American community. And the conversation, critics say, has dark echoes.

‘Scourge of hate’

Indian Americans and South Asian migrants have “become a conspicuous target of online conservative anger,” said Vox. People of Indian heritage are not “being stereotyped as antisocial, criminal, coming here illegally,” said journalist Zaid Jilani to the outlet. Instead, their growing prominence in business and academic “positions that I think a lot of people have typically associated with white folks” have made them a “status threat” to middle-class Americans.

The result is a growing “scourge of anti-Indian American, anti-South Asian hate,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) to The New York Times, after a Hindu temple in Illinois was targeted in an alleged mass shooting plot. Critics point to rhetoric such as that used by Bo French, a Texas Republican who sparked controversy last month when he posted an image of South Asians at a college football game. The “problem” of migration is “now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” said French on X.

Other observers cite “The Indian Question,” a Rufo & Lomez podcast episode recorded in September by conservative commentators Jonathan Keeperman and Christopher Rufo. Many Americans “prefer to live in a homogenous [sic] society,” said Keeperman on X. Critics of Indian migration are pushing back against progressive attempts to “subdue any explicit political effort to maintain a white majority.”

‘Nativists have prevailed’

Talk of an “Indian question” amounts to the “mainstreaming of anti-Indian bigotry,” said Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic. A “historical rule of thumb” is that bad things happen when “your social identity is being made the name of a ‘question.’”

“Playing by America’s rules is no longer enough” for Indian immigrants, said Anang Mittal at Firstpost. The United States “told immigrants to come legally on the basis of merit, and Indians did.” But it seems “the nativists have prevailed, for now.”

In Brazil’s tightly contested presidential election, another contender is back in the spotlight: the outsized role social media plays in its politics.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused Meta of using “biased algorithms and AI restrictions“ to favour opposition candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, said The Associated Press. The son of the far-right former president, Jair, won 47% in the first round of the election compared with 45% for the incumbent.

Lula filed a complaint against the US tech company, claiming it had subjected his campaign to “unjustified reductions in reach”. It claimed Meta had artificially inflated accounts and adverts associated with Bolsonaro, a key ally of Donald Trump.

Meta denies wrongdoing, but ahead of the run-off on Sunday, “questions have festered over whether the digital arena has been a level playing field”, said Al Jazeera.

What is Brazil’s social media footprint?

Brazil is one of the world’s biggest markets for social media. The South American nation boasts about 180 million users, said Statista: more than three-quarters of the population. “Brazil is a power machine on the internet,” actress Fernanda Torres told Variety. “We’re heavy, heavy users.”

And with social media “eclipsing traditional advertising”, political ad spending on Meta’s sites has “grown at a breakneck pace”, said Al Jazeera. But critics warn this shift has “put political hopefuls at the mercy of Big Tech corporations and their biases”.

Left-wing actors in Brazil still “lag significantly behind the far right when it comes to digital communication”, said anthropologist Leticia Cesarino. The logic that underpins the attention economy is “structurally beneficial to the kind of alarmistic, simplistic, affect-laden far-right discourse”.

What are the allegations against Meta?

Google and TikTok are not allowing political advertising, which left Meta’s services as “the only large-scale channels for paid digital campaigning”, said The Guardian.

Meta temporarily disabled ads on Lula’s official campaign Facebook page. He was also briefly unable to boost his Instagram posts, while Bolsonaro could. Lula’s lawyers included this in “evidence” that Meta was “actively trying to interfere” in Bolsonaro’s favour.

Ekō, a digital advocacy non-profit coalition, published a report alleging that Meta had favoured Bolsonaro’s campaign. UN rights experts said reports of restrictions on Meta platforms were concerning. “Information, including from Meta employees, suggests that accounts linked to one side of the presidential race were disproportionately curtailed,” the experts said, without specifying which side.

What is Meta’s defence?

Meta called Lula’s allegations “false and unfounded”, said The Guardian, saying there had been “technical incidents” that affected campaigns from “different parts of the political spectrum”. But Meta’s own semi-independent oversight board said it was “concerned by recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts”, citing Brazil’s election, where there had been an “over-enforcement of Meta’s fraud policies” against Lula.

Brazil’s top electoral court ruled that Meta could not “reduce the distribution of political contact, restrict searches or remove posts in a way that creates an imbalance”, said The Associated Press. Meta says it has complied with the court order to treat both election campaigns equally.

“We apply the same rules to all candidates, parties and political viewpoints in Brazil,” Meta told The Guardian. “We do not suppress content to harm one side or give preferential treatment to any side.”

Masked protesters clad all in black have been a feature of protests around the world for decades. But the “Black Bloc” are back in the news this week, accused by the French government of turning peaceful protests into rioting and violence.

Originating among anarchist and radical left activists in West Germany in the 1980s, the Black Bloc are “temporary groups formed for a specific protest” that “operate without hierarchy”, said Canadian professor Francis Dupuis-Déri on The Conversation back in 2017.

Their tactics spread through activist networks in the US and Canada in the 1990s, culminating in the infamous “Battle of Seattle” during the 1999 World Trade Organization summit. Since then they have been prominent in the anti-austerity movements of the 2010s, and recent youth-led protests that have gripped France and other countries in Asia and South America.

‘Like an orchestra without a conductor’

Ideologically identified with “anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist movements, Black Bloc participants eschew political parties and hierarchical organisations”, said the Financial Times.

They “pose a big problem” for both the police and for trade unions, “who do not want chaos to mar their traditional demonstrations” against government policies.

“They are very well co-ordinated, but in a horizontal way,” said Guillaume Farde, from Sciences Po university in Paris. They have no organised leadership, tactics are disseminated via social media or encrypted messaging apps, and gatherings are often impromptu. “It is like an orchestra who knows the music so well that they do not need a conductor.”

‘Free spirits’

The “founding fathers” of the Black Bloc were “autonomist and anarchist activists”, said Le Monde, “but the spectrum has broadened to include more individuals” who “define themselves as free spirits”.

The movement is certainly “difficult to pin down, both politically and socially”, said historian Sylvain Boulouque in Le Monde in 2019. “It forms a heterogeneous ensemble with variegated political traditions.”

France’s domestic intelligence service “partially shares this analysis”, said Le Monde, citing a police source that said: “Behind the black blocs, real ideologists are developing a doctrine and structure that unifies and deploys propaganda.”

Others see this as an attempt by the authorities to make the Black Bloc into something they are not. “Black bloc doesn’t mean anything”, Henri, a 40-year-old who does not define himself as an anarchist, autonomist or extreme leftist, told Le Monde. “Black is just because it’s not distinctive. It’s the best way not to be identified. We’re all in the same boat.”

With polls looking dire for Republicans ahead of next month’s highly anticipated midterm elections, President Donald Trump and his allies are reportedly wasting little time on the most pressing question of this election cycle: Who will take the blame for the likely, if still theoretical, electoral drubbing? Cue the MAGA infighting, as various White House operators and GOP power brokers jockey to avoid, and in some cases direct, the president’s guaranteed post-midterm scapegoating.

‘Knives are now fully out’

Although Trump has “proven largely incapable of getting out of his own way,” he’s “keenly aware of the grumbling within his party” over the GOP’s midterm prospects and has “begun looking for someone else to take the fall,” said Puck. “Currently at the top of the list” is former White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, who “crafted the party’s midterm strategy.” Days away from a potentially “dire midterm reckoning,” Republicans are “turning their cannons” toward Blair and consulting partner Chris LaCivita, the two men tasked with the “herculean job of maintaining control of Congress,” said Politico.

The hostility toward Blair and LaCivita follows their recent trip to the Balkans to “advise a Russia-friendly regime’s reelection effort” even as GOP prospects “dwindle back home,” said Politico. That excursion “opened the floodgates,” said one source to the outlet. The “knives are now fully out for these two.”

‘Ice maiden is melting’

“These days,” Trump has also been looking to place blame on Susie Wiles, his “once-unassailable White House chief of staff,” for the midterms, said Politico. The president is “musing about replacements for his top aide” while getting “plenty of encouragement from rivals” to Wiles and those settling scores.

Trump’s “ice maiden is melting,” said The New Republic of Wiles. She’s in “some deep sh-t,” said one Trump adviser to Zeteo. At the same time, the president has “tried to pour cold water” on rumors of her fate by “releasing effusively supportive statements” and characteristically condemning the media as “fake news.”

The deadly missile attack by Houthi rebels on Riyadh’s international airport last week “exposed vulnerabilities in the kingdom’s defences that have heaped pressure on the Saudi royal family”, said The Observer.

Thirteen people were killed and hundreds injured in the assault on the heart of Saudi power. “At a stroke, the attack shattered the kingdom’s effort to establish its reputation as a secure global investment hub, backed by world-class sporting events, as it tries to diversify away from a dependence on oil.”

What did the commentators say?

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s bold Saudi Vision 2030 aims to turn the oil-rich country into a hub for tourism, international events and multinational enterprises. Iran’s attacks on US allies in the Gulf had already “dealt a blow” to MBS’ plan, said Agence France-Presse. It “now faces an existential hurdle with unprecedented Houthi attacks, in particular targeting oil infrastructure and airports”.

“I can’t think of another time when the challenge facing MBS was more,” said H.A. Hellyer, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute think tank.

Houthi attacks have already caused a number of major events to be cancelled, most notably the Future Investment Initiative, nicknamed “Davos in the desert”, which forms the centrepiece of MBS’ diversification drive. Upcoming summits between the EU and Gulf Cooperation Council, the inaugural MIPIM Middle East real estate investment event and the Six Kings Slam tennis exhibition tournament have also been disrupted.

Saudi Arabia’s hosting of football’s Asian Cup in January and February is also now “being questioned”, said Rob Draper in The Guardian. As a result “the kingdom’s position in the sporting landscape looks hugely different from a year ago”.

“For Saudi Arabia’s economic transformation to succeed, it needs to welcome global talent, investment and tourists,” said The Washington Post. But “you can’t do that when people can’t land in your country safely,” said Kristen Smith Diwan, from the Arab Gulf States Institute think tank in Washington.

The events of the past week “highlight the profound dilemma facing MBS, who must juggle immediate security imperatives and long-term economic interests”, said the Post.

What next?

Riyadh’s decision to delay the Future Investment Initiative until 2027 underscores the regime’s “willingness to make difficult decisions – as showcased by an ability to pivot from projects like Neom to sectors like artificial intelligence”, said Bloomberg.

But even before the US’ war against Iran began in February, some international investors and Wall Street firms had begun “questioning whether there was enough money to be made in Saudi Arabia”. Analysts now fear “the fallout from the war will hurt the kingdom’s attractiveness”.

Saudi Arabia’s image as “the premier investment destination within the Gulf has taken a hit”, said Matthew Mullman, from Signum Global Advisors. Firms, he said, could now question the case for building critical infrastructure in the kingdom.

The country “can reduce its exposure through diplomacy and a serious Yemeni political process, but a ceasefire cannot endure if it leaves the country’s power struggle unresolved”, said Amine Ayoub, from the Middle East Forum, on Ynet Global. “Riyadh’s nightmare is not merely the Houthi arsenal” but that “strategic choices helped strengthen an adversary whose consequences continue to outlast the policies that produced them”.

Canada’s largest prairie province will remain part of the country, as voters in Alberta overwhelmingly denied an independence referendum that would have started the province on a path to separation. The ripple effect of the defeated referendum now appears set to echo across Canada.

What did the commentators say?

Most Albertans apparently have no desire to break away. With 93% of the votes reported, nearly 76% of respondents chose to remain part of Canada, according to the preliminary referendum results. The vote “marks a major win for Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is facing a trade and political war with the United States amid President Donald Trump’s higher tariffs and repeated suggestions of annexing the country,” said Al Jazeera. While the vote is clear, it may “not spell the end for a movement that has spent decades pushing for greater autonomy from the federal government.”

Many Albertans are “expressing frustration that their views aren’t sufficiently represented by the Liberal government,” said Time. Still, many in the Canadian Parliament have been reluctant to support an independence push because Alberta is an “oil-rich province; mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction made up about a quarter of the province’s GDP in 2025.” Some in the province feel that “central Canada is taking advantage of Alberta; that the central government has, at times, through environmental regulations, for example, hindered the development of the oil resources,” Andrew McDougall, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said to Time.

The vote will also precipitate further questions about whether Alberta Premier Danielle Smith “can maintain control of her party and the province,” said The Globe and Mail. Smith has consistently said she wants Alberta to be part of a “United Canada” but also has a “contentious relationship with the pro-Canada crowd, who have accused her of pandering to separatists.” The vote’s outcome is “unlikely to position Ms. Smith as an ally to the movement.”

What next?

Carney waxed poetic about the referendum’s defeat. Albertans “made a clear choice. They chose unity, to build together and to take care of each other,” the prime minister said on X. The results “mean that Albertans and all Canadians will move forward together with renewed purpose.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is fighting to keep her citizenship. She is under investigation by the Trump administration, whose officials suggest the immigrant lawmaker may not have lawfully become a citizen. Critics say the White House is weaponizing its powers to intimidate one of its fiercest critics in Congress.

‘Creeping totalitarianism’

The administration aims to “ultimately deport” Omar, said The Wall Street Journal. The probe is focused on whether she or her father were truthful in their immigration and naturalization paperwork after leaving Somalia in the 1990s. There is a “process to denaturalize somebody” who has lied on their citizenship paperwork, said Border Czar Tom Homan on Fox News. “If she violated the law, then she will be held accountable."

Omar denies committing fraud. Trump would “love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress,” her office said in a statement to the Journal.

This is a “case of creeping totalitarianism,” said John Ganz at Unpopular Front. Trumpism originated with attacks on former President Barack Obama’s citizenship, grounded in a fundamental belief that “some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate.” And the investigation of Omar is the culmination of an effort to “transform citizenship from an inviolable right into a privilege granted or withdrawn at the sovereign’s discretion.”

Omar would “probably not” be under investigation if she were not in Congress, said David Harsanyi at the Washington Examiner. But she “isn’t above the law, either.” If Omar gained her citizenship through dishonest means, then she “at the very minimum should not be serving in Congress.”

‘No reason to believe it will stop’

The investigation demonstrates how the Trump administration sees citizenship “not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward” that can be taken away, said Emily Tamkin at The Forward. Such power can be easily misused for “silencing political opposition.”

Omar is facing investigation because she has “dared to criticize the president,” said Obama on X. There is “no reason to believe it will stop with her.” The Trump administration’s “transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans.”

With the midterms two weeks away, there’s a good chance Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives, according to polls. And some believe Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will face a battle among fellow GOP members for the role of House minority leader in the new Congress.

‘Delicate dance’

With many seemingly resigned to a midterm loss, Republicans are “jockeying behind the scenes over who could lead their party in the minority,” said Annie Grayer at CNN. One of the top contenders is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is undergoing a “delicate dance” to position himself for the leadership role. Though Jordan has publicly supported Johnson, he may be “laying the groundwork to run for the top leadership spot if they lose the chamber.”

Some GOP members are more likely to “seek a leader who is willing to serve as a check on the Trump administration if Democrats flip the House,” said Sudiksha Kochi at The Hill. “I hear it all the time in the District. We want a check and balance. We don’t want a rubber stamp,” said one GOP lawmaker to the outlet. There will be a “potential push to support someone else as leader besides Johnson if the party suffers major losses in the midterms,” said Kochi.

‘Stay and serve’

Johnson rejects the possibility of a leadership change should the GOP majority fall. In the “unlikely scenario where we lost the majority, I would expect my colleagues would ask me to continue leading this conference, even if we have divided government,” he said to CBS News amid a push for Republican fundraising. “My intention is to stay and serve, and that’s what I have been doing, as best I can.”

Some Republicans have “insisted that Johnson has enough support in the party to continue running the conference even if they lose the majority,” said Mariana Alfaro at The Washington Post. These officials feel it would “not be Johnson but Trump who will be blamed if the party loses the House,” especially given Trump’s “unpopularity and that his policies have led to high prices.”

The White House press briefing room briefly had a new boss, but Katie Zacharia ended her tenure as President Donald Trump’s press secretary last week after just five days. Questions were instantly raised about former television pundit Zacharia and her qualifications for the position, which has an infamously high turnover rate.

Zacharia’s selection

The 41-year-old Zacharia graduated from Pepperdine University in California and appeared to garner favor with Trump after regular appearances on the conservative network Newsmax. But her eligibility for the role of press secretary became a topic of discussion after her first White House press briefing, in which she spoke for only 14 minutes, read “pro-Trump talking points” and called on three reporters, said CNN. Fox News host Sean Hannity, among other critics, sounded “unimpressed with her performance and her answers.”

Questions also surrounded Zacharia’s murky legal background. Zacharia consistently described herself as a lawyer and did receive a law degree at Pepperdine. But there is “no evidence that Zacharia ever passed a bar exam or has been admitted to practice law in any state,” journalist Judd Legum said in his Popular Information newsletter. She reportedly lives near Los Angeles but is not listed as an attorney with the State Bar of California. Zacharia later told reporters she took the bar while living in China, but she “couldn’t have practiced law in China because foreigners are forbidden to do so,” said The New Republic.

‘Even shorter than Scaramucci’

After her press conference and botched answers about her professional status, the writing seemed to be on the wall for Zacharia, despite the White House standing behind her. She “delivered a commanding inaugural press briefing as the 37th White House Press Secretary,” the Trump administration initially said in a statement.

But five days after she took on the role, several news outlets confirmed that Trump had parted ways with Zacharia. Her time as press secretary is the shortest in U.S. history, and her White House tenure was “even shorter than Anthony Scaramucci’s as White House communications director during Trump’s first term,” said NBC News. Scaramucci was in the role for just 11 days and “his name became a descriptor for public officials whose terms were exceedingly brief.”

Trumpworld’s latest scandal “is an open-and-shut case of staggering corruption,” said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. President Trump forced U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign recently after The Wall Street Journal reported she pressured Trump donor Eric Deters to cover her $100,000 American Express bill before her 2025 confirmation hearing. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she texted Deters. He had been asking her for favors, including help making an IRS audit disappear, and Guilfoyle—Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée—promised that if he paid off her debt, she’d be his “Trump ride or die” and introduce him to high- ranking administration officials. Deters didn’t acquiesce, complaining he’d already paid her $300,000 in “speaking fees.” While serving as ambassador, the Journal reported, Guilfoyle’s grifting continued: She often brought a Greek energy company lobbyist to official meetings of government officials and bragged about Greek tycoons funding her luxury travel. In resigning, Guilfoyle denied any wrongdoing, but Trump said, “We didn’t like what we were reading.”

Guilfoyle’s corruption was too blatant for Trump to ignore just before the midterms, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch, but she’s a dangerous person for him to alienate. As his son’s long time girlfriend and Trumpworld insider, “she’s assuredly learned too much about Trump family malfeasance” to be exiled with no means of support. Trump will likely “lateral her over to some private-sector position, buying her silence with a well paid sinecure.” Guilfoyle “isn’t the exception to the rule in how America’s third-world government operates.” In Trumpworld, “everyone is getting paid.”

That includes her ex-fiancé, said Robby Soave in Reason. “It’s fair to ask some questions about Trump Jr.,” who also had dealings with Deters, and whose May wedding was largely funded by a Russian oligarch. Trump’s sons are heavily invested in companies that have made billions in government business, while Democratic lawmakers have alleged conflicts of interest by Trump special envoys Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who often mix diplomatic roles and business interests. Republicans eviscerated Hunter Biden for foreign dealings during his own dad’s presidency but are now responding to evidence of Trumpworld’s massive corruption with “stony silence.” It’s no surprise Trump’s “team of mercenaries” are using “their roles to cash in,” said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. “They learned it by watching him.”

What happened

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) came under federal investigation recently for her finances, just days after federal agents raided her home and issued subpoenas for her family members as part of a sprawling immigration probe that could produce criminal charges or a denaturalization case against her. The moves marked a dramatic escalation targeting one of President Trump’s most outspoken critics. Sources told The Washington Post that an investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been looking into whether Omar, 44, or her late father lied about her birth date and omitted information about his past military service when they were immigrating to the U.S. from Somalia in 1995. Separately, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said her office is probing whether the representative inflated her net worth on financial disclosure forms, an allegation for which she had already been cleared by the Office of Congressional Conduct. Omar said Trump is trying “to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.

The search is a highly unusual breach of the “blackout” period customarily observed by the DOJ in the 60 days before an election, during which the agency typically refrains from taking any public actions that could imply partisanship or influence the election’s outcome. Speaking to reporters last week, President Trump denied that he had played a direct role in the raid on Omar’s residence but called her a “terrible person.” One senior Democrat told Axios that the search set off alarm bells within the party, which expects “more October surprises.”

What the columnists said

This shameful episode was clearly designed to cast “an air of suspicion and criminality” over one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent progressives, said Moira Donegan in The Guardian. Omar has frequently been targeted by the “conspiracist cesspool of the far-right internet,” which has circulated a number of unfounded rumors about her, including the allegation that she was once married to her own brother. Those attacks found their champion in Trump, who “has been smearing her,” and her country of origin, “for the better part of a decade.”

After repeatedly overreaching in other cases, the Trump administration doesn’t “deserve the benefit of the doubt,” said Rich Lowry in National Review. But Omar has done herself no favors by responding to legitimate questions about her background with “angry, uninformative dismissals.” For instance, she has called her father a teacher, when his obituary referred to him as “an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army.” Did he disclose that to U.S. immigration authorities?

This is Trump’s last midterm pitch, said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe: “Gutter racism.” That’s “the tie that binds Trump to his followers.” He amplified “disgusting lies” about Haitian immigrants in the 2024 presidential campaign and recently called New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, a Black woman, “a dog.” Trump must believe that appealing to the MAGA faithful’s worst selves will ensure they support his “worst-of-the-worst presidency.”

A weekend of protests in France that saw widespread violence, destruction and looting has made next April’s presidential election even more consequential than it already was.

What started off as student demonstrations over poor school conditions has spiralled into a mass protest movement driven by anger at the cost of living and the state of public services.

Emmanuel Macron refused to accept the resignation of his interior minister over the weekend. The president also used a televised address on Sunday to call for national unity and sought to reassure the public that the perpetrators of the violence would be punished.

“The French passion for protest is legendary in Europe,” said Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor. But six months out from an “already fraught” election, these demonstrations are becoming highly politicised, with the hard left, under presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused of “weaponising student frustration” and the far-right, under Marine Le Pen, using footage of the violence to pitch herself as the candidate of a calm and peaceful France.

What did the commentators say?

PM Sébastien Lecornu has made little secret of who he believes is to blame for the protests, accusing members of Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise of “instrumentalising the high school movement for their electoral advantage”, then going through the motions of condemning any violence.

The 75-year-old left-wing firebrand joined Saturday’s protests in which half a million people took to the streets in Paris, but has said accusations that he was responsible for the mayhem were aimed at weakening his presidential bid.

He is in a close race with centre-left candidate Raphaël Glucksmann and Edouard Philippe, from the centre-right, to see who will go up against Le Pen in a two-way run-off for the presidency next April.

Mélenchon is a veteran politician who “appeals to young people and heads an insurgent party built on grass-roots protest”, so the student-led demonstrations that have swept the country in recent weeks are “a golden opportunity” for him, said Mark Landler in The New York Times. But images of riot police, tear gas and streets in flames also carry “acute risks for a politician seeking mainstream acceptance”.

The violence on the margins of what were mostly “massive, peaceful demonstrations” is “potentially ruinous” for Mélenchon, said Peter McPhee, a history professor at the University of Melbourne, on The Conversation.

By contrast, it has been an “early Christmas present” for Le Pen, who has promised to “reimpose discipline in schools, increase funding for police” and target the instigators of the violence and looting as “obviously” illegal migrants to be deported.

“I see only one beneficiary and that’s Le Pen,” Paul Smith, from the University of Nottingham, told Al Jazeera. But Emile Chabal, from the University of Edinburgh, cautioned against automatically assuming a far-right gain, with “fear of disorder” historically benefiting conservative or centrist parties in France.

What next?

With six months left in office and unable to run for a third term, Macron is already seen as head of “pretty much a lame duck government”, said Alistair Bunkall on Sky News. Now his authority seems to be “ebbing away” even more.

“The TV pictures of the past few weeks will hardly inspire confidence,” said the broadcaster. There are “red warning signs” flashing for France’s economy and “a failure by the minority French government to secure a budget deal would be the next big tipping point”.

It is still too early to tell how this will play out at the polls next year. As Jérôme Rodrigues, a prominent activist from the 2018 gilets jaunes protests, said: “Anger has no political party. An empty fridge has no political party.”

With affordability concerns threatening Republican control of Congress, President Donald Trump last week announced an agreement to increase supply by relaxing sanctions on Russian diesel fuel. But economists say lower prices are unlikely to result, and the announcement produced pushback from both Ukraine and Trump’s GOP allies. The only clear beneficiary may be Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

‘More dangerous world’

The president’s deal “has no winners,” said Keith Johnson at Foreign Policy. Trump’s announcement will not “help consumers, won’t help Kyiv and won’t mean riches for Moscow.” The global market consumes about 120 million tons of diesel monthly. The 500,000 tons offered by Russia is “too small to move prices.” And the move does nothing to address the U.S. war on Iran, which is the “real cause of the global energy crunch.”

It “makes no sense” to think easing pressures on Russia can “lower diesel prices before the midterms,” said Timothy Snyder at Project Syndicate. Moscow is already struggling with its own “domestic shortages” because of Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. But the announcement has the effect of “visibly aligning” the United States with Russia. The president’s “openly pro-Russian foreign policy” is creating a “more dangerous world” of emboldened aggressors.

Trump’s move has created a rift with both “Republican allies and European leaders,” said Nick Wadhams at Bloomberg. It is a bet that “lowering fuel prices will be the best way to win more votes next month.” The gambit is “unlikely to succeed.”

Helping the Russian economy?

Trump “proffered sanctions relief for Russian diesel” while Putin “offered more war” in return, Paul Sonne said at The New York Times. The deal benefits Trump to the extent it enables his “stubborn denial that his own decision to go to war against Iran caused fuel prices to skyrocket.” And it could “pour billions of dollars into the Russian economy,” further enabling Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Putin is a “dictator reviled by most Americans,” said Axios. Polls show 81% of Trump’s voters dislike the Russian leader. That makes it “unclear” what the agreement will do for “American security, European allies or his own political fortunes.”

Democrats don’t know whether to trust the numbers or their guts. Polls suggest a blue wave is coming in the November midterms. But the party faithful are not so sure, fearful of a GOP October surprise — or maybe just a math error — that could upend their hopes.

Not a ‘sure thing’

“Welcome to the Wile E. Coyote moment,” said Daniel W. Drezner on Substack. President Donald Trump’s “historic unpopularity” is hurting GOP candidates, and “all of the signs point to a big blue wave.” Democrats and their supporters, though, are going to “keep their powder dry out of fear that Trump pulls off another comeback.”

A blue wave “isn’t a sure thing,” said The Daily Beast. The polls are depicting a “disastrous picture for Republicans,” but they could be distorted by “inaccurate sample groups, skewed data sampling and unknowable voter behavior.” Trump certainly thinks so. “My REAL polling numbers” are the “best they have ever been,” he said on Truth Social. It is unlikely, however, that an “unrecorded mass of Trump voters” will save Republican candidates in November, said The Daily Beast.

“You should believe the polls this time,” said Bill Scher at Washington Monthly. While it is true that pollsters in this summer’s Michigan’s Senate primary and Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary “struggled to reach certain demographics,” there is still “lots of other data,” including Trump’s “abysmal job approval,” pointing to big Democratic gains in the midterms. But Democrats should try “not to be complacent” about those signs.

Polling mirage?

Pollsters “can’t keep up” with the “sharply increased demand for polling” created by a larger-than-usual number of competitive races in the midterms, said The Washington Post. This signifies “more opportunity” for Democrats and “more defense” for Republicans, said Cygnal CEO Brent Buchanan to the outlet. Such demand affects the results. Voters are “tired of being surveyed and increasingly reluctant to pick up the phone,” said the Post.

Some GOP candidates “see a polling mirage” in the results, said Axios. Even with questions about polling accuracy, though, “most pollsters believe Democrats have the edge” in the midterms.

“After a career spent getting readers excited about credit-default swaps (‘The Big Short’) and sabermetrics (‘Moneyball’)”, the American journalist Michael Lewis “decided to try to help people understand the importance of civil servants”, said Sam Freedman in The Guardian.

He did this first in “The Fifth Risk”, his 2018 book about the damage caused by the first Trump administration’s “almost complete lack of interest” in the workings of government. Now, he has written a “loose sequel” dealing with Donald Trump’s return to office and, “this time around, the problem is not indifference but malicious intent to destroy”.

“Blockers” is an account of the vandalistic work of Elon Musk’s Doge and “other agents of chaos”, notably Republican operative Russell Vought, who essentially became Trump’s cost-cutter-in-chief when Musk fell out with the president. At the same time, it shines a light on the “blockers” – Musk’s derisive term for the “dedicated officials” who did their best to hinder his reforms.

The book is a “rollercoaster”, said Laura Miller on Slate. It alternates between “heartening stories of stellar federal civil servants” and “blood-pressure-spiking accounts” of the “Elon-worshipping idiot boys” sent to slash their budgets or hound them from their jobs. In one chapter, we see an IRS official “locking herself in a darkened conference room” to avoid a “capricious Doge goon who wanted her to give him confidential information on seven million taxpayers”.

Another is focused on Francis Collins, who was sacked from his senior role at the National Institutes of Health. Among a host of distinguished achievements, Collins was “instrumental in identifying the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis”. Yet he was forced to leave at short notice, carrying his possessions in “a small cardboard box”. Lewis suggests that, ironically, the person ultimately responsible for his dismissal was Vought, whose own daughter has cystic fibrosis.

Such stories aren’t just personal tragedies, said Tim Adams in The Observer; they are calamitous for America. The cuts carried out by Musk and others led to “vast institutional knowledge” being removed at a stroke, “to be replaced by venal incompetence”.

The aim was to “dispose of and humiliate” an entire class of people who cared about the good that government could do, and about following legal due process. Nor did Doge’s reforms even succeed on their own terms: despite Musk’s boast that he would cut $2 trillion from the government’s $7 trillion budget, this year’s federal spend is estimated to be $7.4 trillion. Lewis has produced an “essential record” of a dismal episode in American history.

Have the Tories been written off too soon? As commentators point to a “Badenoch bounce”, Reform UK has fallen to third place behind the Conservatives in recent polls.

Nigel Farage’s party has slipped to 21%, two points behind the Tories and three behind Labour, according to a YouGov poll carried out this week. The Conservatives’ 23% – up three percentage points on the previous week – is their highest rating since January 2025.

What did the commentators say?

Recent polling seems to point to a “Badenoch bounce” after “the most trouble-free Conservative Party conference in some years”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. Her “improving recognition, policy announcements and forceful personality have helped to slowly drag her party back up in the polls”.

Badenoch “intends to reunite the right by welcoming back Reform UK’s voters while dismissing its leaders as racists, fraudsters and takers of dodgy donations”, said Andrew Gimson in The i Paper.

Boris Johnson “pursued” the same strategy seven years ago when he “proved he was serious about getting Brexit done by removing the whip from 21 Conservative MPs who refused to back him”, and this forced Farage “to stand down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats”.

“Respectability is an important element in her pitch” and Badenoch “dares to be unfashionable”. This is “one reason why she carries conviction with those who might vote Conservative”, because “they too are unfashionable”.

Meanwhile, “cracks have begun to appear” in Farage’s “image as a straight-talking, honest alternative to the politicians whom he claims has let down the country”, said Jules Walkden on Politics Home. He “appears to be alienating the very voters Reform needs to win over”, and though he was once his party’s “greatest asset”, he “may fast be turning into a liability”.

You may be wondering “why much of the media are talking about a Badenoch revival”, said Jonathan Liew in The Guardian, when “her party lost 563 councillors and 40% of its councils” this year and “remains about four points below its apparent nadir of 2024”.

The fact is this “civil war on the right” is a “charade” – a “fake fight being enacted for our benefit” because the “right bloc is now a single basic substance, responsive and carefully calibrated to the different audiences it needs to capture”.

So if, “after all the bickering and infighting, a coalition should be required”, do we “really expect a Conservative Party founded entirely on the gain and exercise of power to suddenly turn it down?”

What next?

Following the successful Tory conference, Badenoch’s “first objective” is not “a spectacular leap in support, but to establish a consistent lead over Reform”. This would “begin changing the political dynamic on the right”, said Caroline Wheeler and Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper.

With sustained “small gains” leading to “incremental progress”, she can “gradually change how voters, commentators and rival parties perceive the contest”. This would increase the “evidence” that the Tories are “recovering” – a “perception” that might, “in turn”, help “attract voters who want a credible alternative to Labour”.

James Talarico is not the only Democrat with a shot at winning an election in Texas. Polls show challenger Gina Hinojosa, spurred on by Latino voters and the data center backlash, is running neck and neck with longtime GOP incumbent Greg Abbott in the governor’s race.

What did the commentators say?

Polls have the Hinojosa-Abbott race “statistically tied” heading into the final weeks, said The Center Square. It is a startling turn for Abbott, who is seeking a fourth term. He has never lost a statewide election “by less than 11 points,” said Slate. But some rural voters are defecting over Abbott’s “past support for data centers,” and Lone Star Latino voters are turning against the GOP because of the “president’s handling of the economy and mass deportations,” said NBC News.

Hinojosa is “perhaps the most serious electoral challenger” Abbott has faced, said the Houston Chronicle. The Democrat has sharpened a “populist message” that asks voters to “set aside the culture wars” in favor of policies and politicians that help them “make ends meet.” It is a message that arrives amid voter anger over “rising prices and seemingly unchecked growth of Big Tech.”

Democrats have long dreamed of a “blue Texas,” said Nicole Russell at USA Today. Nonetheless, the Lone Star state is “one of the top places Americans move” because it has no income tax and is affordable. All that is made possible by “embracing conservative values.” Voters will not want to “upend that way of life” by electing a Democrat.

What next?

Polls in previous elections have given Texas Democrats “reason to hope for an upset” only to end in disappointment, said The Washington Post. Hinojosa still faces an uphill climb. A Democrat has “not been elected to the governor's mansion in Texas since Ann Richards in 1990,” said CBS News. Still, national Democrats are “stepping up” their support for Hinojosa. The Democratic Governors Association and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are both putting “at least $1 million” toward her election.

Nearly a century after holding its last public execution, the United States government this month announced plans to broadcast the December execution of Nidal Hasan, a former army officer convicted for the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood. Not only will Hasan be killed by firing squad, said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but the government intends to “make sure people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” Unsurprisingly, the plans to federally livestream a shooting death have prompted both massive condemnation and pockets of support from many in President Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition

‘Public and brutal, not private and medicalized’

Livestreaming Hasan’s death is “excellent,” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) on X. A public execution is “what this terrorist deserves.” Critics simply don’t have to watch the killing “if they don’t choose to,” said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on CBS News’ “Face The Nation with Margaret Brennan” this weekend. Executions should be “public and brutal, not private and medicalized,” said defense tech executive and newly named Pentagon consultant Palmer Luckey on X.

“You live by the sword, you die by the sword,” said retired Staff Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who survived Hasan’s attack, to NBC News. “He needs to go out by firing squad.” But while Lunsford “endorses livestreaming the event,” said the outlet, he also expressed concern over children seeing Hasan’s death.

‘Beyond disgusting’

The broad American public is “overwhelmingly against the Pentagon’s decision,” said Fox News. Those who spoke with the network “blasted the broadcast as ‘a shame’ and ‘just weird.’” Although Hasan “should face the death penalty,” livestreaming his killing is “beyond disgusting,” said retiring North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis on X. Any Catholic service members detailed to Hasan’s firing squad should “request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church,” said Archbishop for the Military Services Timothy P. Broglio in a statement.

Notably, Trump himself has “privately shared misgivings” about livestreaming the execution, said Axios. He “didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic” about the broadcast, said one confidante to the outlet. “That’s why he’s calling around, doing the Trump thing, asking people what they think.”

Kristi Noem was ousted from her role as Homeland Security secretary in March 2026, but her final moments as the agency’s head are under renewed scrutiny due to airplanes she purchased for DHS. These transactions are especially controversial because they were reportedly made through one of Noem’s political donors.

What did Noem do?

Noem purchased the vehicles on her last morning as DHS secretary, paying at least $304 million for five airplanes from the Daedalus Aviation Corporation, according to a report by The New York Times. The prices that Daedalus sold the planes for were “millions of dollars higher than the typical market value for jets of that age,” said the Times, and included a Gulfstream jet purchased by Daedalus for $83 million but resold to DHS for $106 million. In all, Noem acquired 10 airplanes throughout her 14 months at the department.

One of the agency’s purchases included a Boeing 737 that was “converted into a massive private jet, complete with a stand-up bar, two bedrooms, marble showers and a table covered in manta ray skin,” said the Times. The purchases are coming under additional fire because the head of Daedalus, William Walters, is one of Noem’s donors and gave “$10,000 to political action committee American Resolve, which supported Noem,” said NewsNation.

What has the fallout been?

Many have criticized Noem for the purchases. The deal “smacks of Noem making money for a former donor and saddling American taxpayers with the cost, without any benefit to them or the government,” said The New Republic. Some were especially angry that Walters was essentially “given a no-bid contract to acquire planes for deportation flights, acting as a middleman by buying planes from elsewhere and reselling them to the government.”

Noem has denied any wrongdoing regarding the plane purchases. The Times’ report was “dishonest” and “factually incorrect,” she said on X. While not disputing that the planes were bought, Noem rejected the characterization of Walters as a donor because he “did not personally make political contributions to Secretary Noem.” The Times “stands by the characterization of the political donor and his firm,” the outlet’s public relations department said in a response on X. Walters’ donation was given to a “group that existed to support Ms. Noem.”

For the past decade, the Republican Party under President Donald Trump has been overtly dedicated to accentuating traditional gender roles. This administration has gone out of its way to celebrate “masculine” virtues including high testosterone levels, strenuous physical fitness regimens and a dedication to male-focused video gaming. In 2024, that strategy seemed to work, with young men helping to propel Trump back into political power. But now, as Republicans stare down a daunting final leg of the 2026 midterm race, polling shows this once-reliable MAGA voting bloc may be decidedly less reliable.

‘Evaporated’ gains and ‘instant ramifications’

Trump may have “won young men outright” in 2024, but a Cygnal poll from September shows Democrats now leading among men between the ages of 18 to 30 by 17 points, said USA Today. Among Republican voters, men under 40 represent the “group that is most at risk” of peeling off, given their “concerns about the economy and prices,” said The Washington Post. This bloc “proved pivotal” to Trump’s 2024 “sweep of some of the same battleground states holding critical elections this year.”

Republicans were previously able to “capitalize on an environment” in which young men felt “either ignored or actively disliked by the Democratic Party,” said the National Review. But the “cultural factors” that pushed men toward the GOP two years ago “may be outweighed by economic factors this time around.”

The GOP’s 2024 inroads among young men have “evaporated” in a shift that could have “instant ramifications this November,” said Politico. While “young men alone likely won’t determine control of Congress,” their “lack of enthusiasm itself” is a “warning sign for Republicans.”

A football-based strategy

The GOP is making a “massive bet on football” as it scrambles for “midterm momentum,” said Axios. The party is “pouring millions into advertising” at NFL and college games in an attempt to “hold onto male voters — football’s core audience.”

Despite these efforts, Democrats “appear to be gaining ground with young men,” said The Hill. The Cygnal poll showed the demographic has a “negative view of the Republican Party overall.” Democrats “fared slightly better,” though the party “still had a net-negative favorability rating among these voters.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address had it all, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post: “the good, bad, and dangerous.” In September's histrionic speech, Hegseth strutted back and forth across a stage, combining culture-war rants “with genuinely radical” reforms. He declared he wanted “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” in a military he’s refashioning with high-testosterone lethal patriots. He accused the media of treason for reporting his military’s Iran failures, and revealed he plans an overall 20% reduction in generals and admirals, continuing a purge that’s already eliminated 10% of top officers. But Hegseth also announced some sensible “attempts to transform a sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy,” unveiling an “Autonomous Warfare Command” to oversee drone operations and enlisting tech founders Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich to study the future of warfare. Quite intentionally, Hegseth is overturning “military norms as aggressively as President Trump has shattered those in other spheres.

Hegseth only proved again that he’s “manifestly unfit for his job,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. His speech was “a partisan disgrace,” filled with childish insults and resentment. He’s creating an Office of Religious Affairs and directing cadets to get degrees at conservative Christian schools like Hillsdale College, instead of elite “woke factories” like Harvard. To “redefine the future of national defense,” Hegseth is giving his “three wise men” in Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich just 120 days. The overall goal is to ensure the military becomes “a MAGA-looking, MAGA-sounding, MAGA- believing, and MAGA-supporting Christian praetorian guard,” said Rachel E. VanLandingham in MS.now. “The ideological clowns are out,” Hegseth proclaimed, but he’s “the real ideological clown—and a dangerous one at that.”

Everyone underestimated the former Fox News host, said Emma Ashford in Foreign Policy. He’s become Trump’s “most influential senior official.” Hegseth helped persuade Trump to invade Iran when many aides warned against a prolonged quagmire. Trump has fired other Cabinet officials for incompetence, but Hegseth has escaped blame for the fiasco in Iran. Why? Everything about him is so “fundamentally Trumpian”—his hatred of the media, his macho posturing, his TV persona’s “obsession with image over substance.” Hegseth is Trump’s “central casting” idea of a tough military leader, so he’s keeping his job. “The results will not be pleasant.”

What happened?

The U.S. election map appeared to shift in favor of Democrats recently, heightening Republicans’ fears that voters angry over the Iran war and the rising cost of living are poised to deliver the GOP a midterm drubbing. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved three key Senate races toward Democrats, who must pick up four GOP seats to win control of the chamber. New Hampshire went from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat”; North Carolina from “lean Democrat” to “likely Democrat”; and Kansas, where megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton is neck and neck with Republican incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall, from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.” Seemingly giving up on North Carolina, where former Democratic governor Roy Cooper has a comfortable lead over Republican Michael Whatley, the top GOP Senate super PAC canceled its ads there and shifted funding to South Carolina—which Trump carried by 18 percentage points in 2024— and Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. A New York Times/Siena poll found Democratic Senate candidates leading in reliably Republican Ohio, Alaska, and Texas, and one point behind in Iowa. With Democrats favored to take the House, a GOP strategist drew lines to the blue wave of 2006. “If the bottom continues falling out,” he told Politico, “this will be worse.”

President Trump floated suspending the federal gas tax to ease anger over pump prices averaging $4.50 a gallon, a move that would require congressional action. Trump, whose approval rating hit a record-low 32% in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, held rallies in Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas. The dire polls are “fake,” Trump said in Mobile, Ala., and “don’t account for the fact that Trump is out campaigning.”

What the columnists said

A huge cash advantage was “supposed to be the GOP’s ace,” said Isaac Arnsdorf in The Washington Post. Since Labor Day, Republicans have poured half a billion dollars into competitive House and Senate races. But Democrats’ advantage on a generic congressional ballot has only widened since then, from about 6 points to 9, according to one polling average. Over $190 million in attack ads aimed at Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan hasn’t moved the needle—El-Sayed’s favorability is up 5 points since August, according to Fox News surveys.

Democrats are gaining ground with several key groups, said Ruth Igielnik in The New York Times. They include voters under 30, who in the Times/Siena poll favored Democrats by 30 points, and Latinos, who favored Democrats by 24 points in a recent NBC News/Telemundo poll, up from 12 points before the 2024 election. And in nearly every state the Times polled, Democrats are winning among independents, “the bloc of swing voters that typically decides elections.” The polls could be wrong, said Jim Newell in Slate. They’ve previously “underestimated Republican energy in the Trump era,” by failing to reach enough white, noncollege voters. Since those abound in red states like Kansas and Iowa, “the error there will be greater if pollsters are missing this cohort again.”

If the polls are right, Republicans see a potential “lifeline” in left-leaning New Hampshire, said Ken Thomas in The Wall Street Journal. John Sununu—a moderate former one-term senator— is narrowly trailing Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas, who has for months “been urging the national party to avoid complacency in the battleground state.” Maine, where longtime Sen. Susan Collins is in a tight race with Democrat Troy Jackson, could give Republicans another swing-state win.

But it’s a marker of Republicans’ vulnerability that Democrats have “found an opening in one of America’s reddest states,” said Lauren Egan in The Bulwark. Trump won Kansas by 21 points in 2016, and 16 points in 2024. But Democratic Senate challenger Hamilton has “run a masterful race” pitched to the center—and he’s been aided by Trump policies. Medicaid cuts are squeezing rural health care providers in the state. Its farm industry, already hit hard by tariffs that shrunk exports, is now struggling with the soaring price of diesel for tractors and combines. And ICE raids at meat- processing plants have “enraged” those in the livestock industry.

That Kansas is in play beggars belief, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. “This stubborn, spiritually rhomboid state” has voted GOP in every federal statewide race “since an aberrational blip at the dawn of the Roosevelt administration.” But such is the effect of Trump’s agenda on “otherwise deep-red, agribusiness heartlands.” I believe Marshall will pull it out, but with rough weather ahead for the GOP, the state is “officially on tornado watch.” The “conditions for a freak event are now fully in place.”

With polls suggesting a potentially historic showing for Democratic candidates in next month’s midterm elections, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has a message for some in his party’s most enthusiastic base: slow down. Should the Democrats take control of one, if not both, chambers of Congress next term, the party should not expend energy impeaching President Donald Trump. Instead, they should focus on a “comprehensive ethics package” that can be used for future accountability. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Emanuel’s message of temperance has not been fully embraced by a party whose base is champing at the bit for change.

Impeachment is ‘going to be a food fight’

If Democrats take the House majority in November as they’re widely expected to do, they should “pass an ethics package” rather than jumping straight into an impeachment effort — “because it’s not going anywhere,” said Emanuel on “Meet the Press” this week. An impeachment push would simply “be a food fight,” signaling a “return to the politics of fighting.”

Polling last month showed government corruption “emerged as the second-highest-rated issue voters were concerned about,” said NBC News. “On the airwaves,” ads about “tackling government corruption and banning congressional stock trading” have “been a top issue” from both parties.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has not thrown his weight behind nascent impeachment efforts, and this “appeared to suggest this summer that it would not be a top priority,” said Fox News. Despite having impeached Trump “twice during his first term,” Democrats this time around “haven’t made much of an effort to impeach the president again,” said The Hill.

‘Wised-up disciplinarian figure’

Moderate Democrats like Emanuel are “laying the groundwork” for ineffective governance by advancing “‘don’t impeach anymore & just get back to work’ messaging,” said Mark Copelovitch, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on Bluesky. Rather than strictly running for office now, Emanuel is “using the midterms to build his base among future Democratic office-holders” ahead of a likely 2028 presidential campaign, said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Substack. By framing himself as a “wised-up disciplinarian figure,” Emanuel offers the “same hoary consultant-brewed panacea” he introduced “as one of the initial class of New Democrats in the early 1990s.”