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Welcome to this week’s episode of Under the Radar, where we look at what the Trump regime is doing behind the scenes while keeping all of us distracted with their chaos and corruption. This week, I want to dive into the narrative that the Republican Party has constructed over decades, that they are the party of family values, that it is they who care about our children, whereas Democrats are the real threat.

Believe it or not, that is an actual campaign ad for Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor of California. To be clear, there is no evidence that either actor in the ad is a minor. Hilton says they’re real actors and the ad was not generated by AI, but it is a remarkable choice for a political movement that has spent years accusing everyone else of sexualizing children.

And Republicans have spent decades using words like groomer and predator against teachers, librarians, LGBTQ+ Americans, doctors, and their political opponents. So we decided to take a look at some of the people inside the Republican Party. I think it’s safe to say that they’re throwing stones in glass houses.

On September 23rd of this year, former Minnesota Republican State Senator Justin Icorn was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to attempted possession of child pornography.

Icorn had been arrested in March 2025 during an undercover operation targeting commercial sex involving juveniles. According to federal prosecutors, an undercover officer repeatedly told Icorn that she was 17 years old. Icorn continued communicating with her, discussed prices for sex acts, requested a sexually explicit photograph, and arranged to meet her. Investigators found cash and a condom in his vehicle. Icorn resigned from the Minnesota Senate shortly after. He eventually pled guilty to attempted possession of child pornography and was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison, followed by five years of supervised release.

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It is alarming to know that this man has four children. It is even more troubling to recognize that, despite his crimes against an alleged minor, he received merely a 16-month prison sentence.

Until this summer, David Pritt was a Republican member of the West Virginia House of Delegates and an assistant majority leader. He was also a public school teacher. On July 22nd, 2026, Pritt was arrested following an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor. A federal grand jury subsequently indicted him on charges of sexual exploitation of a child, coercion and enticement of a child, and witness tampering. Federal prosecutors alleged that Pritt persuaded, induced, enticed, or coerced a minor female to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing sexually explicit images.

The alleged conduct occurred between March 2024 and January 2026. Pritt resigned from the West Virginia legislature following his arrest, and his school district suspended and later terminated his employment.

I’m not entirely sure why that’s all that happened to him, but of course, Pritt is not the only Republican state legislator facing federal cases involving children. Former South Carolina Republican state representative Robert R.J. May III was arrested in June 2025 after a federal grand jury indicted him on ten counts of distributing sexual child abuse material. Federal prosecutors alleged that May used the online alias Joe Biden to distribute 220 files containing child sexual abuse material over five days in 2024. Investigators alleged that some material depicted children as young as infants and toddlers. May resigned from the South Carolina House in August 2025 and pled guilty to five counts of distributing child sexual abuse material.

On January 14th, 2026, a federal judge sentenced him to 17.5 years in federal prison.

Dennis Hastert was one of the most powerful Republicans ever to serve in Congress. He was Speaker of the House for many years and he died in disgrace. Federal prosecutors stated that Hastert sexually abused teenage boys decades earlier while working as a high school wrestling coach in Illinois. Haster ultimately acknowledged sexually abusing boys he had coached. Due to the statute of limitations, which should not exist, he could not be prosecuted for the abuse itself. Instead, he pled guilty to illegally structuring bank withdrawals connected to hush money payments intended to conceal his misconduct. At his sentencing in 2016, Federal Judge Thomas Durkin described Hastert as a serial child molester.

On October 5th, two days after Hastert’s death, Fox News marked his passing with an in memoriam:

From the US Supreme Court as justices begin their new term with some controversial issues on the docket, as we go to break, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert has died. The Republican from Illinois served that post from 1999 to 2007. He was the longest serving Republican House speaker ever. His reputation was later tainted by allegations he had molested athletes during his career as a teacher and wrestling coach. He spent more than a year in prison. Hastert died Saturday of natural causes. Denny Hastert was 84.

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Tainted, you say? The man sexually abused minor children in his charge. He was a monster, and many Republicans knew what was going on, but Hastert served their purposes.

This is not an isolated incident. There’s much, much more. Right at the top of all of this is a legal case involving Donald Trump. Journalist and legal analyst Katie Phang is suing the Justice Department over its handling of the Epstein files. Phang alleges that the DOJ has violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act by improperly redacting and withholding records that Congress ordered to be released. Among the disputed records are FBI materials involving a woman who told federal investigators in 2019 that Jeffrey Epstein had introduced her to Donald decades earlier when she was approximately 13 years old.

The woman was interviewed by the FBI four times in 2019. When the DOJ initially released millions of pages from the Epstein files, records from only one of those interviews were included.

After news organizations reported that records were missing, the DOJ released additional interview summaries in March, stating these had been mistakenly coded as duplicates. In those subsequently released records, the woman alleged that Epstein brought her to New York or New Jersey and introduced her to Donald. She alleged that Donald attempted to force her to perform a sex act, and when she resisted, he punched her in the head.

Katie Phang is fighting to obtain the handwritten notes taken by FBI agents during the woman’s four interviews. On September 16th, Federal Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to turn over redacted copies of those handwritten FBI interview notes for the judge to review privately.

The American people deserve and want transparency and the truth. As a trial lawyer, I understand the law. I understand that since December of 2025, the Attorney General of the United States in the Trump regime has been violating a federal law each and every day in his failure to provide the unredacted Epstein files, and that is why I have sued. There are two different wars being waged: one in the court of law and one in the court of public opinion. Convicted felon Donald Trump and the Trump administration led by his personal lawyer, Attorney General Todd Blanche is losing on both fronts. There is no two standards of justice. There should not be a double standard when it comes to justice, and I will fight for the truth and I will fight for the survivors and for all of the communities of survivors.

We all deserve to know what is in the Epstein files, especially the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Todd Blanche, the most disgraceful attorney general in American history, needs to comply with the law or be impeached and removed from office.

It is clear by now that the Republican Party’s ranks are filled with men who have committed horrible crimes against young women and girls. They are utterly complicit in the cover-up of the men who are allegedly in the Epstein files. We know for a fact that Donald is mentioned almost as often as Jeffrey Epstein himself.

So yes, we demand to know what is in the Epstein files and who Todd Blanche and others at the Department of Justice are protecting. We know that a jury has found Donald liable for rape.

What do you think is in the Epstein files, and why do you think so many people don’t want us to know?

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Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of Trump Trolls Trump. We find ourselves just ten days away from the midterm elections, a pivotal moment for our democracy. Early voting is already underway in many states, if you haven’t registered yet, do so and then go vote! Making your voice heard is fun and free, a rare constitutional right that remains available to us, and it’s one we must cherish and uphold.

It has now been 642 days since Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025 a day that will live in infamy. Today, we’re taking a look back at the antics of the past week in our nation’s ongoing reality show.

October has been particularly busy for Donald. He claims not to worry about the polls, but there’s a significant gap between what he says and his actions. He’s been campaigning, if you can call it that, at a feverish pace, having held nearly twenty rallies since October 1st. He’s been strutting across very red states, visiting New York, Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Montana, Alaska, Arizona, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and Florida, even returning to Georgia for a second time tonight. What’s the rationale behind this relentless focus on these reliably Republican strongholds?

While he proclaims that the ballot box doesn’t concern him, his frantic rally circuit poses a different narrative. It’s somewhat baffling—one has to wonder if he’s feeling the pressure. Is he tired? How does he manage to stay awake through this marathon of self-promotion?

He claims it isn’t easy to stand there for two hours ranting and raving, though you have to admit that there’s a certain level of adoration emanating from the crowds at these events. For him, that emotional high must be a driving force. Yet, we can’t overlook the intimidation tactics masquerading as love. What epitomizes love better than forcibly removing a woman from a rally simply for exercising her First Amendment right to protest? It fills me with warmth when I see elderly women being escorted from half-filled arenas while displaying a peaceful gesture of dissent. What could possibly define the Republican version of fellowship better than a group of men assaulting a woman simply because of the t-shirt she’s wearing?

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But let’s not dwell too much on the abhorrent behavior exhibited last week; instead, let me summarize what we believe is Donald’s closing midterm message to voters. Because, frankly, we need to protect our sanity.

I didn’t get the Nobel Prize. I didn’t get the bullets. I should have gotten the Pulitzer for writing too. Everybody said, “Well, you’ll get it.” They said, “I’ll get it last year.” The person who got it, a very high quality woman. She gave it to me, high quality. So everyone said, “Don’t worry, you’ll get it this year.” Well, that didn’t happen. It’s just ridiculous. I settled like eight wars. How the hell did you not get the Nobel Prize? The woman that got it, I don’t know where the hell she comes from. Sir, we could do $1,775. I said, “That’s a strange number that why does that number remind me of something?” But being a super genius, I said, “Ha, if I invest nearly $1 more, I’m at $1776.” You remember that? He built the wall, but Mexico didn’t pay. Mexico did pay. They pay massive tariffs.

Not only did they pay, I even called the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Okay? That’s a thing. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that on Monday morning we’ll be changing the name of the Atlantic Ocean to the American Ocean. We just extinguished a nuclear bomb from the worst country in the world and our gas prices, it’s a small thing to pay. Our gas prices are lower than under Obama. My wife is a very elegant, beautiful woman. She’s actually becoming the next Eleanor Roosevelt. She’s always saying, “Please don’t dance on stage.”

Where does one even start with that? Apparently, I am also a “super genius” because I can add one to numbers. And as for Melania being the next Eleanor Roosevelt—well, I’m pretty sure Eleanor Roosevelt was certainly not a Russian plant. But I digress. What truly concerns me isn’t just the fabrications or the outright absurdity of Donald’s comments; it’s the fact that many in that crowd reveled in it.

Back to the topic of bribery. Last weekend, Donald shared more about the aforementioned $5,000 dividend check he’s been promising. If Donald were genuinely offering that money, one could argue it qualifies as bribery, but realistically, does anyone actually expect him to follow through?

The Trump dividend is approximately, as an example, $1 trillion. So if you do that, it costs the country $1 trillion, but we have a record-setting $21 trillion that’s being invested in the United States just in 15 months.

He even suggested how these imaginary funds could be utilized. In what seems to be his standard comedic style, he quipped:

So let’s go to Miami, darling, or let’s go to Palm Beach and enjoy the president for lunch. Let’s have lunch at Mar-a-Lago, where for $5,000 you’ll get one hamburger and a small dessert.

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It’s almost laughable how he spins such outlandish claims about wealth distribution, especially when he underscores how his supporters will be left with nothing but empty promises.

And just when you think it couldn’t get more ludicrous, on October 14th, Donald held a rally in Kalispell, Montana. That day, he found himself oddly impressed with a recent poll conducted by CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten. During this rally, he declared:

He’s very good. He may not have a job tomorrow, but these are minor details.

Well, let’s see what Enten actually revealed about Donald’s polling numbers.

Trump’s not approving. It’s an all-time low. At the beginning of his term, he was plus six. Now he’s talking negative 35 points—his worst showing ever in the Reuters Ipsos poll. Among independents, he’s 54 points underwater.

This is rich. Who says Donald isn’t the best at something? He excels at being the worst! Hooray for him.

As Vice President Baby JD Vance took the stage for an FBI field office press conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, he chose to stand next to none other than the most incompetent Attorney Generals in American history, Todd Blanche. here is what Baby JD had to say:

We don’t try people in the court of public opinion. We actually try people according to the real facts that are out there. But I can tell you this attorney general and the entire administration, we reject pay for play. We reject anybody getting enriched off of their connections to the government.

I can’t even begin to comprehend the irony. I mean, should we really trust someone who’s clearly benefitted from their familial ties?

Look, if Vance and Donald are serious about cleaning up government corruption, they might want to start by looking in the mirror. It extends beyond mere lip service regarding their standards of ethics. After all, it’s hard to argue against fraud when you’re rooting for it from the inside.

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Finally, Pete Hegseth, in addition to being Secretary of Defense, has proudly taken on the title of Interior Designer. According to sources at the Washington Post, Hegseth has been fixated on acquiring a historic globe that belonged to Eisenhower, insisting it be displayed in his Pentagon office.

You’d think that such a significant artifact would be treated with care, right?

Instead, his staff attempted the move themselves and dropped it—leaving a sizable hole near Antarctica.

Accidents happen,” the Defense Department stated. “We are grateful no one was harmed, and the globe is being repaired.

Seriously? What world are we living in where the mishandling of a globe is deemed acceptable? Unbelievable.

As we prepare for the upcoming midterms, let’s remember what’s at stake. We have ten days left to make our voices echo through the ballot box. And while things appear dire, there’s a plan in the works. And you may want to sit down for this.

There’s been talk of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, apparently spearheaded by Melania. Who better than a woman accused of being a Russian plant to negotiate peace, right?

Her senior advisor stated:

Both sides formally recognized her as an intermediary, giving her the power to negotiate this ceasefire. She’s been working tirelessly now for over a month.

I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. It sounds like a reality TV storyline, not a plan for global peace.

As we draw our discussions to a close, remember: mockery is our superpower. It is long past time to hold the Trump regime accountable for their rampant corruption, incompetence, and treasonous behavior.

Thank you for joining me this week. Go out there and vote!

Until next week, thank you for joining me.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

What is the best way to make sure that the 2028 presidential election is free and fair? Well, that would be to make sure that Democratic Attorneys General get elected in 2026. And a phenomenal Democrat and democracy champion running for Florida Attorney General is Jose Javier Rodriguez, and we had a great conversation.

Please visit JJR’s website HERE

Check out Mary Trump’s Transcend PAC HERE

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Mary Trump: I am so thrilled to be here with Jose Javier Rodriguez, who will be the next Attorney General of Florida. It is so good to see you. I know you’re swamped, but thank you for taking the time.

Jose Javier Rodriguez: No, Mary, thank you for having me on. It’s great to be with you.

Mary Trump: So clearly this is an incredibly important election and the position of Attorney General, especially in a state like Florida, is extremely important. So I wanted to get a sense of how things are on the ground right now and why the Florida Attorney General is such an important position for a champion of democracy to hold, because things would be very different if there were a Republican AG in say the 2028 presidential election.

Jose Javier Rodriguez: Well, listen, one of the things that I do on the campaign trail is I ask voters to vote for Jose Javier Rodriguez here in Florida, but I also ask voters to raise their expectations from the Attorney General’s office because Floridians can be forgiven for having low expectations. We’ve learned to expect cheap press conferences, cruel political theater, and brazen corruption from the Attorney General. It’s been very partisan, just like the kind of stuff you’d think they were running for Congress out of the AG’s office. And really what we need is frankly just folks to be normal. We need an Attorney General that’s just going to do the job, strictly enforce the law, go after powerful and dangerous people and stay in their lane. And so in a weird way, I feel like I’m the conservative because my opponent is so radical and so corrupt.

I’m telling people that I’m going to focus on crime, costs and corruption. That is doing the job, making your life better, making you safer, and actually doing the thing that people don’t expect from the AG’s office anymore, which is take on the powerful, particularly economically. They’re screwing us from Tallahassee. I go around and I talk about fighting the utilities and the insurance companies. They’re driving up our costs. And Floridians just don’t even expect that anymore out of the AG’s office. We’ve been without that for so long. And the corruption here is brazen. I can give you an update on just how bad it is from here in Florida.

Mary Trump: Yeah, that would be great because you raised such a crucially important point. The attorneys general should be neutral and should be interested in upholding the rule of law and holding people who break the law accountable. How nice would that be? Right? And it has become partisan. It has become about protecting the powerful and the corrupt. So even more important, again, in a state like Florida, which as you say is mind-blowingly corrupt. So what is the update on Florida corruption?

Jose Javier Rodriguez: Mind-blowingly, yes. Okay, so the biggest political crime we’ve seen in modern times here in Florida is a scheme orchestrated through the DeSantis administration, but my opponent was his chief of staff at the time. They stole ten million dollars that was supposed to come back to the Medicaid program, routed it through nonprofits and political committees that my opponent, James Uthmeyer, controlled in order to use in political campaigns, specifically to campaign against popular ballot initiatives here in Florida in 2024. So just to wrap your head around the fact that they did that, it gets worse. So there’s been bipartisan outrage about that. A House committee in the State House did a criminal referral to a local prosecutor there in Tallahassee. A grand jury looked at the whole thing, laid bare this whole operation where my opponent was at the center of it directing the whole thing. It was his political committees. It appeared to be his idea, although it’s not clear if that was the case.

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He was the one directing the whole operation. And the problem here in Florida is apparently out of Tallahassee, the problem for them is not the corruption. It’s the fact that we’re talking about the corruption. So they came up with this brazen effort, not only to go after and tell their story, which is bogus and we could go into that, but the important part is they came up with a legal strategy to try to intimidate people and get people to stop talking about their corruption. The ten million dollars that they stole, they don’t want us to talk about it. And so they sued a whole bunch of people, including the Democratic Party, and then they tried to go to an appellate court and say that the grand jury report, which was leaked, it shouldn’t have been leaked, but people can talk about it. I mean, it was leaked. And they went to an appellate court trying to get the appellate court to order everyone not to talk about it.

That failed. Their lawsuit against the Democratic Party, they had to withdraw it because they were afraid they’d have to actually present testimony and have people cross-examine them in an open hearing. And the last piece is a frightening piece, and I’m kind of winding up to the part that is most concerning. We have twenty state attorneys here. They’re the equivalent of our district attorneys, the locally elected prosecutors. They somehow rallied a small number of them to send threatening letters to TV stations saying if they continued to air ads about Hope Florida and talk about Hope Florida, that they might be subject to criminal liability. This is frightening. First Amendment activity. The same activity the governor himself and the AG have engaged in. We’ve also talked about the grand jury testimony, and they’re sending this to TV stations in the middle of an election.

How unusual it is for prosecutors to say, “Hey, I think what you’re doing is illegal, FYI.” I mean, they don’t do that. So I want to highlight two things. One, no state TV station was cowed. Nobody took the ads down. The other important thing is the majority, if not the overwhelming majority of state attorneys said, “No way.” Democrat and Republican said they want no part of using the threat of law enforcement to squelch the First Amendment right that we all have, especially our journalists. So the corruption has really backfired on them. Their effort to try to get us to stop talking about the corruption has just backfired. And it is a little clownish, their strategy. It’s failed everywhere, but it is also very dangerous. That kind of precedent, that anybody should even think about trying to do that, is very dangerous.

So thanks for letting me speak about that, but it’s an important issue going on here.

Mary Trump: It’s an important issue and it’s an important concept, right? It’s like they float the trial balloon and even if the scheme doesn’t work, just talking about that kind of thing becomes normalized. And again, this idea that the corruption’s not the problem, it’s that people are talking about the corruption. That’s a slippery slope. And you are making the case that anybody who participates in that cannot be trusted to be an attorney general of anything, let alone a state in which these problems seem to be endemic.

So before we go on, I just want to remind everybody that despite the fact that the midterms are almost here, that doesn’t mean that campaigns don’t need people to donate money to them. So please go and donate to Jose Javier Rodriguez’s campaign to be Attorney General of Florida, because even at this late date, money coming in can have a real impact, right?

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Jose Javier Rodriguez: A hundred percent. So our website is Here and absolutely, funds we get even at this late date help us keep our ads up, help us have the resources to have a ground game in different parts of the state, and also radio ads and all the things that we need to continue communicating through the end of election day itself. One thing I will mention for those donors that give from Florida, so real live Floridians who donate, that is matched by the state up to two hundred and fifty dollars. It’s a matching program we still have on the books here in Florida. And one thing I’ll mention about that, even though my opponent is wildly corrupt and has a lot more money than us, when it comes to the matching funds, we consistently get as much as nine times what he gets, which tells you that our grassroots support here in Florida is a lot stronger than his.

And so of course we welcome support from all Americans, but obviously it’s at a premium if you’re a real live Floridian and one of the many thousands that support our efforts.

Mary Trump: Oh, that’s fantastic. That’s really good to hear because I know this is sort of a truism at this point, but this is truly the most important election we’ve ever had. And as I said earlier, it always matters who the attorney general of any state is, but particularly in the next couple of elections that we’re going to be facing after this, particularly the 2028 presidential election. So could you just explain to us why that’s the case and why we desperately need somebody who believes in the rule of law and will uphold it like you to be Florida’s attorney general?

Jose Javier Rodriguez: One hundred percent. I mean, I think in addition to our secretaries of state, the attorney generals in our states are extraordinarily important in making sure that the law is complied with and that we have free and fair elections. In many states, just as here, we have locally elected supervisors of election. They are also very important. And in all of those offices, the highest, most important job is to make sure that we continue to have well-run elections that are fair. And so that is obviously a pledge that I will make. Now what my concern is, we’ve had plenty of Republican and Democrat attorney generals here in the state of Florida who have been normal and done the job. I would disagree with some of their priorities, maybe say they’ve kind of abused the office in some different ways, but my opponent is actively doing the opposite of what the job commands.

The ten million dollars out of the Medicaid program, it’s called the Hope Florida scandal. That’s just one example, but there are many other areas where asking the Attorney General to help out is almost like calling an arsonist to put out a fire. He’s doing the opposite, right? And so you want somebody to root out corruption, and it’s not just that he’s sitting on the sidelines and letting it happen. He’s joining in. And the same thing with so many other problems. It’s not just that he’s sitting on the sidelines where our rates go up in Tallahassee. He’s actually helping those special interests to do it. And so that is absolutely not the kind of person you want at the helm on any major controversial issue where you’ve got to stand up and say, “This is the law, this is what’s right.” He hasn’t shown us that he’s willing to do that in any area, much less making sure that election integrity is a top priority.

Mary Trump: Yeah, and obviously you are in opposition to all of what your opponent stands for, and that’s one of the many reasons you are one of our democracy champions. Your dedication to the rule of law, your understanding that accountability is so important and the corruption must be accounted for, and many other reasons. So I want to ask you what you envision happening after the election’s over and Democrats are in power and we have more candidates like you in their positions having been elected. But before you answer that question, I just want to remind people how important it is to vote. So if you haven’t registered yet, please do. If you are registered or think you are registered, check. Don’t take it for granted. Keep checking. Make sure you’re registered up until the time you actually cast your vote.

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So Jose Javier Rodriguez, Republicans win, you become Florida’s Attorney General. What can Democrats who have a majority and have real power do? Because not only does so much need to be undone, we need to start reimagining how we do things altogether.

Jose Javier Rodriguez: Absolutely. So folks can go to my website, jjr.vote, to see my day one priorities. A lot of the things that are not just sort of first hundred days, but first couple of days are getting the state of Florida out of a bunch of really silly and expensive things that are just frankly for show. And so what I’ll say is my whole career in one way or the other has been about standing up to bullies. I talk about that a lot on the campaign trail. And as Attorney General, your job is to stand up to the federal government when the federal government is picking on your state or picking on your people. And so having attorneys general that are responsive to the people and not just looking at getting approval from DC on everything, just laying out the red carpet for DC. And by the way, as a footnote, if folks want to know what corruption really looks like and want to look up the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution, read up on that and how my opponent has helped orchestrate the giveaway of one of the most valuable parcels in Miami, a three hundred million dollar parcel on prime land that belongs to our community college here in Miami.

Look it up because it’s pretty crazy, but that’s a footnote. But standing up to the bullies in DC, my heroes are state attorneys general across the country because when you see victories in the courts related to tariffs, the restoration of SNAP benefits, the illegal use of the National Guard or federal law enforcement, a lot of those victories, if not all of the major ones, involve attorneys general at the state level or coalitions of them who bring a legal action. And sometimes what frustrates me is it doesn’t even sometimes make the article who brought the action, or sometimes it’s not until one of the last paragraphs and says, “Oh yeah, by the way, attorney general in such and such a state led a coalition to sue the administration and get this victory.” But that is a key role of attorneys general. I haven’t campaigned on partisan issues.

A lot of these issues shouldn’t be partisan. It’s really just standing up for your state. If you’re getting screwed and you shouldn’t be and the federal administration’s taking advantage of you, again, we have an attorney general right now who rolls out the red carpet for anything and just showers the president even personally with our tax dollars. It’s such an extreme. I mean, stand up for us. My opponent almost treats the president as if he’s like a feudal lord or something like that. I mean, it’s absurd and it’s embarrassing and we just need a normal attorney general who will say no, who will stand up and fight for us when the feds are doing the wrong thing.

Mary Trump: Okay, Floridians, you have your marching orders. The case is clear. This is no contest. Cast your vote for Jose Javier Rodriguez for Florida Attorney General. I cannot underscore how important this race in particular is. So thank you so much for joining us. Again, I can’t even imagine how busy you are right now.

Jose Javier Rodriguez: No, I want to thank you for your work, the high honor of being one of your champions. I appreciate that very much. The site is HERE and all counties here in Florida, we have early voting going on as of now through Saturday. And of course, so make a plan to vote please, and thank you very much.

Mary Trump: All right. Thanks everybody. Please let us know what you think in the comments. Your voice is an important part of the conversation. Thanks for joining us.

Please visit JJR’s website HERE

Check out Mary Trump’s Transcend PAC HERE

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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I had a great interview with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart from "The Rest is Politics" when I was in the UK last week. Please enjoy.

Alastair Campbell: I think Donald Trump is narcissistic, mendacious, incompetent, corrupted, and a deeply maligning force in the world. History will judge him as the worst president in history. Today we are joined by someone who thinks on similar lines but who speaks from a much greater authority than I could ever hold because she has known him all her life. Mary Trump, his niece and the only woman in the world who can call him Uncle Donald. The picture she paints is not a pretty one, but it might help us answer this critical question: if he really is so bad, so empty, so cruel, so broken as a human being, what does this say about America and indeed our world that he became its president not once but twice, and worse the second time around?

Rory Stewart: Mary, I guess firstly, welcome. Can I start on a slightly different level: what does it feel like to get that kind of introduction? Is it a bit unsettling? Are you getting tired of having to talk about your uncle?

Mary Trump: The introduction was spot on. That is an excellent summation of where we are and that very important question: how did we get here? Maybe tired is not putting it strongly enough. I’m sick to death of having to talk about Donald Trump because he is still such a relevant presence in our lives. That is both tragedy and travesty. We have gotten to this place where we cannot ignore him. There was a time in American politics where that would have been the best thing to do, but we are beyond that now because he is having a very real, deleterious impact every single day throughout the world, and it is actually getting worse.

Rory Stewart: Was there a time when you thought you were done talking about it, and then realized it actually matters?

Mary Trump: In 2024, when I thought there was a possibility either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris would win, that possibility dissipated pretty quickly as the election got closer. I thought if Kamala Harris won, I am done. I would not have been done talking about American politics because we would have still been in the woods, but I would not have spoken about Donald again unless and until he reared his head again. Clearly that did not happen. So I still think it is necessary and I do not see a recent future in which it will not be.

Alastair Campbell: There is an extraordinary passage in your book where you describe your grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., as a high-functioning sociopath. What was he like?

Mary Trump: My grandfather was a constant presence in my life, but we were not close because he was not really close with anybody. He had no emotional depth and his priorities were his business, which is to say making a lot of money, and his family, which is to say making sure he had somebody to take over and extend his legacy. My grandparents lived in Jamaica Estates, Queens, and we lived in the next town over. When we were kids, my brother, I, and my older cousin, we were at my grandparents’ house every weekend. My grandmother was more of a presence, but we were not close either until well after my dad died when I was sixteen. There was no real emotional connection. We did not have long, deep conversations about anything. We certainly never talked about our feelings. So my grandmother was very closed off in ways and not emotionally available. I think she had a lot of physical ailments and also some emotional and psychological problems that were never addressed.

Alastair Campbell: “The Cruelty Is the Point.” What was it like feeling that? Did you feel it at the time that this was about being cruel, that if you wanted to be strong, you had to be cruel? And that was actually why your grandfather did not really care for your dad?

Mary Trump: The cruelty is the point was a phrase coined by journalist Adam Sewer, and it does go a long way to understanding how Donald behaves. He got that from my grandfather because for reasons I still do not quite understand, my grandfather needed his sons to be killers. They had to be tough. When you grow up in a family in which things like kindness, empathy, generosity, and sensitivity are considered weakness, that is getting you off on the wrong foot. Donald had my father as an object lesson. My dad was about seven and a half years older and was supposed to be the next in line to take over the family empire. He was kind and sensitive and funny and generous. He was an expert boatsman and fisherman. He got his pilot’s license when he was in college on his own. He was in the ROTC and then joined the National Guard. All of these things were completely anathema to my grandfather. So over time, even though my dad had started as the one my grandfather was grooming, he realized that my father was not the person he wanted. He systematically, over the next couple of decades, dismantled him entirely and humiliated him.

Alastair Campbell: And Donald plays a big role in that as a child.

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Mary Trump: Yes. The lesson he learned was do not be anything like Freddy. Do not be kind. Do not be empathetic. Do not be sensitive. You have to pretend that you have no emotional needs and the only way to make it in this world is to kill everybody else off, metaphorically speaking, and literally now. That is who Donald knew he had to become so he also would not get killed off because that is essentially what my grandfather did to my father. He dismantled him to the point where he could not survive this life anymore. So that led to Donald’s tamping down any instincts he might have had that would have led to his being what my grandfather would have considered a loser. And there was nothing worse you could be in my family.

Alastair Campbell: When he dies and there are disputes over the will, your grandmother essentially said, “I would not worry too much. There is nothing there anyway.” As if your grandfather was just a conman. What did she mean?

Mary Trump: What she said to me word for word was, “Do you know what your father was worth when he died? A whole lot of nothing.” That is literally what she said about her own son who died at the age of forty-two. What she meant was he had nothing. He was worth nothing literally and metaphorically. That is the entire calculation in this family. Therefore you should also get nothing. In my grandfather’s will, we were not mentioned in it. We were referred to as the issue of Fred C. Trump Jr. We were not even named. So that is what they thought.

Rory Stewart: How large was the estate your grandfather left?

Mary Trump: It was worth about a billion dollars. Our expectation, if things had been fair, is that my brother and I would have split twenty percent of the estate because my grandfather had five children, but we got nothing because my dad was worth nothing.

Alastair Campbell: There is so much that is unbearable in this. I mean, there are so many extraordinary passages in this book. I just wanted to read one because it sort of captures something that is still true today. This was written at the end of his first term in July 2020. You wrote:

Donald today, as much as he was at three years old, is incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information. Donald’s need for affirmation is so great he does not seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he would not condescend to be seen with outside a rally. His deep-seated insecurities are created in a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he has soaked it in.

That is far beyond garden variety narcissism. Donald is not simply weak. His ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every minute because he knows deep down he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved, so he must draw you in if he can by getting you to assent to even the most seemingly insignificant thing.

Alastair Campbell: And when you read that, you see Trump today. Just this week fighting with a tiger on AI because someone got killed by a tiger and he is basically saying I would have killed the tiger. I mean, we are talking about monstrousness here.

Rory Stewart: Take us back to the early days of Donald Trump. He was two and a half years old when your grandmother was hospitalized. You mention this was a critical period.

Mary Trump: My grandmother was advised not to have any children after my Aunt Elizabeth, but my grandfather wanted to have five children. So they had Donald and then very shortly after, my uncle Robert. And then nine months after Robert was born, my grandmother got very ill and had to be rushed to the hospital. Over the course of a couple of weeks, she had several surgeries, and for about a year, she was in and out of the hospital and either physically or emotionally absent because even when she was home, she was in a great deal of pain and could not participate in any child rearing. So that left Donald, who was two and a half, which is a critical period of emotional, psychological, and physical development for children, completely alone because my grandfather was not going to provide any of the actual caregiving that children that age need. That set Donald up to become the person we see today. Even when my grandmother recovered, she never made up for the ruptures that happened during that year and never developed an emotional closeness with any of her sons. But Donald was particularly vulnerable.

Alastair Campbell: And what about Donald Trump as a father? What sense do you have of his relationship with his children?

Mary Trump: I did not see much because his children basically belong to a different generation. Donnie is twelve years younger than I am, and Ivanka is I think sixteen years younger. I really only saw them at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but he was an entirely hands-off father. He had no real interest in his children. When Ivanka got older, he had this very odd attachment to her, but I cannot exactly say that it was paternal. She was constantly sitting on his lap, and I cannot really explain it, but I found it odd and off-putting. But he did not have any real emotional connection, certainly not to the two older boys.

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Alastair Campbell: Has he ever read a book?

Mary Trump: No. And neither has my grandfather. The only reading I ever saw Donald do was newspaper clippings about himself. He has literally no intellectual curiosity whatsoever.

Alastair Campbell: Why has he been seemingly so successful in his own terms? Why has he been able to build the profile to win an election, then lose but pretend he has not, and then win again?

Mary Trump: He has literally no redeeming characteristics whatsoever. Strengths are different from redeeming qualities. The question of how this man who was objectively weak, insecure, unaccomplished, unintelligent, and failed, was allowed to accrue the kind of power, influence, and money that he has accrued is the question we are going to try to answer for the rest of our lives. I think it is a perfect storm of things. It is the decline of independent objective media, social media, which I think has eroded people’s capacity for critical thinking. It is the decline in our system of education, the cultural shift driven by the right in our country away from enlightenment principles and a lack of belief in science. There is a turning away from investment in the things that matter most: science, the arts, the humanities. And a focus on greed, the accumulation of wealth, and the ability of people on the right to convince people that things like the social safety net are bad and that the common good does not exist anymore.

Alastair Campbell: We interviewed Gavin Newsom and he said, “Without Rupert Murdoch, there is no Donald Trump.” Are you of that opinion?

Mary Trump: I would go back further. I would say if Richard Nixon had been held accountable for his crimes, we would not have Donald. If he had gotten convicted and gone to prison, that would have set a marker. That would have said, “We do not care who you are. Even if you are president of the United States, you are not above the law. Anybody else who committed the crimes he committed would have gone to prison.” In fact, everybody else in his administration pretty much went to prison. So why should he be exempted? And now we have our corrupt, illegitimate super majority on our Supreme Court, essentially making Donald Trump an imperial president who is constitutionally beyond the law according to them.

Rory Stewart: The great question for a historian is how did a mediocre man take power? Sometimes we use the word charisma to try to describe this. Is the problem that it is a charisma that does not work on you but you can sort of see it working on other people?

Mary Trump: You are exactly right. And I think that is why so many people who think the way we think have such a difficult time grappling with this because they do not experience the charisma, and yet that does not mean it does not exist. If you had the great misfortune of meeting Donald, and I do not know if this is true anymore because he has become so degraded over the last two years in particular, but the first moment you meet him, you would get it. He does have that innate ability to connect with people in a way that makes them feel seen and understood. A lot of politicians have that ability. He is this wounded victim and he wants you to feel bad for him and then become responsible for assuaging his pain. It is very manipulative and entirely unconscious, but it is effective.

Rory Stewart: Can you give an example from your own experience?

Mary Trump: I had not seen him in about ten years or something when I went to the White House for my aunt’s birthday party in April of 2017. It was weird, unsettling, and awful. When I first saw him right before we went into the dining room, he pointed at me. He said, “I specifically asked for you to be here.” I was like, “No, you did not.” But if I had not known that he was full of it, I might have felt like, “Oh, well, that is sweet.” That is what he does. And there are clearly plenty of people on the planet who are susceptible to that kind of charm or charisma because he is objectively now a very, very wealthy, very powerful man.

Alastair Campbell: One thing that is difficult to understand is how the corruption can just be happening in plain sight. You say he has no sort of normal paternal relationship with his sons, but my God, he is making them rich. Has he got a similar succession thing going on in his head that your grandfather had?

Mary Trump: No, actually, which is interesting because my grandfather really did care about his legacy and really did want his empire to exist in perpetuity. For Donald, he is a nihilist. He does not think anybody can exist after him. I also do not think he believes he is going to cease existing ever. There is a reason he has not picked a successor to be the next Republican president because nobody could be as good as he is. He will just keep being president. With his sons and their wealth, that is just a reflection. It just reflects well of him if they are really rich too.

Rory Stewart: When he came in for the second time, some commentators said he is an isolationist who just wants Europe to pay more for Ukraine. But what it turned out to be is Europe should fail. He was going to invite Putin to Alaska. He is going to lift sanctions on Russian diesel. It is not that he wanted Europe to pay for it and succeed. It seems he expected Europe to fail.

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Mary Trump: That touches on two things that are important to him: money and humiliation. During his first term, he was talking to police cadets and saying, “Hey, when you have a suspect and you are putting him in the back of the police car, do not worry if he hits his head.” And now we have ICE agents, a government agency, murdering American citizens in the streets and nothing is happening. Now we are in a war of choice against a country that did not provoke us. Now we are abandoning our democratic ally so Donald can enrich himself with this deal with Russia. So it just gets people used to things. The reason this is happening now is because one of the few things Donald is good at is softening the ground, making the unacceptable acceptable over time.

The corruption is way out in the open, and we have been told forever that with Donald, it is baked in. That is just who he is. So there is no judgment and it is dangerous and that is a failure on the part of the media. We have this guy who only cares about money and power using his greed and his desperation to humiliate our allies so that he can feel like he is like Putin, he is like Xi, he is like Kim Jong-un. He is president for life. He is a totalitarian dictator.

Alastair Campbell: Is he jealous of them? Do you think he has flipped sides or do you think he was always on Putin’s side?

Mary Trump: Oh, absolutely he is jealous of them. He has been on Putin’s side since the eighties, I believe. The betrayal of Ukraine is just obscene. Donald has made it clear from the beginning that he is not really interested in protecting Ukraine. He has dragged his feet. As soon as there is any pushback from Putin, he is making it very clear whose side he is on.

Rory Stewart: When Donald Trump is no longer with us, there will be people in Europe who just hope that everything can go back to how it was. But the thing is, his awfulness has actually revealed the truth about a certain American view, which is pretty permanent. What he has shown by showing American power and vulnerability, by showing that he does not really care about universal values, makes it very difficult for anyone who follows him to rebuild the kind of trust that existed before. And when you hear Marco Rubio, when you hear JD Vance, when you hear Stephen Miller, when you hear Hegseth, you think it is not just Donald Trump. There is something out here that Europe and Canada need to be serious about.

Mary Trump: I agree. I take no pleasure in agreeing with you, but it is true and we do not do ourselves any favors by pretending otherwise. It is not just Donald. Donald has been enabled at every step of the way. If there had been a mechanism in place that the Republican Party had been willing to use to contain him, to restrain him, we would not be having this conversation. There are thousands of co-conspirators here who need to be held just as accountable as Donald, and they will be the ones waiting to be next in line to continue this path we are on. In America, we cannot go back. We need to completely reshape, remake, and reimagine who we are as a country, because right now there is literally no reason I can see that any of our allies would ever trust us again, unless we do very hard work in the next couple of generations, not just to undo the damage, but to prove that we can be trusted. That is going to require some serious soul searching and a willingness to step back and acknowledge what we have done.

Rory Stewart: I am fascinated by the way that Donald Trump talks about men. His constant commentary on how handsome they are. He was checking out some guy’s ass the other day. What does that suggest to you?

Mary Trump: I have a terrible gaydar actually, but what I do know is that he talks more admiringly about men physically than most straight women I know. So it is very alarming, but I think it is just a sign of how his impulse control is eroding. He cannot help it. He has no filter anymore. He has never had much impulse control, but it is completely gone. We see all sorts of signs of disinhibition. He was at a rally and he just threw a glass of water on the floor for no reason. And now he is talking about men’s asses and checking them out in front of thousands of people. It is deeply weird, especially since he has been known since Roy Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS back in the eighties, his notorious lawyer, for being a virulent homophobe. So your guess is as good as mine, but I think it might be diagnostic.

Rory Stewart: Let us finish on the diagnostic thing. You did a doctorate in clinical psychology. What insights does that give you into your uncle, and also what are the limits of trying to do a psychological diagnosis on a family member?

Mary Trump: The advantages are the fact that in addition to the clinical training, I have the personal insight and experience with this family. The book itself, I consider it a psychological history of a family. It is more about the family system and the impact it had on his psychological development. The limits are that diagnosis is a process. You cannot just diagnose somebody because you have seen them a lot. You need to test them. But I think the biggest limit, even though I have a pretty clear assessment of what his clinical profile looks like, is that it kind of does not matter anymore. Look at what he is doing. Look at the impact he is having. Does it matter if he is a malignant narcissist or a sociopath? I do not think it matters anymore because we are dealing with the fallout of his very troubled upbringing and what that has not just done to him, but to the rest of us as a result. We are just living in his world and we have got to figure out how to get out of it.

Rory Stewart: What do you think his psychological profile is, as a clinical psychologist?

Mary Trump: I think Donald presents as somebody who probably has some kind of learning disorder. From what I understand from my experience, he drinks dozens of Diet Cokes a day. He is probably sleep disordered and has some kind of dependence on caffeine. He has multiple personality disorders. He has dependent personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, probably a couple of others, and antisocial personality disorder, and that is on a spectrum. He is way on the sociopathy side of that spectrum because as we know, he has no empathy. He has no problem breaking the law, breaking the rules, and he is cruel. He is a deeply psychologically disordered person who has never been formally diagnosed, therefore never been treated. All of those conditions have been deteriorating over the last seven or eight decades, which is terrifying.

Alastair Campbell: : Mary, thank you for joining us.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary Trump: What indeed most people in the United Kingdom think about us. Donald and Elon Musk are betraying our ally Ukraine to benefit our adversary Russia and Vladimir Putin, and we are destabilizing the Middle East as well as undermining our alliances. If only Americans knew as much about American politics as people in Great Britain, the world would be a much better place. Enjoy.

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Andrew Marr: Mary Trump is Donald Trump’s niece. She is a psychologist and she is a longtime critic of her uncle. Today, she was able to join me in the studio where I began by asking whether his use of American technology as a weapon against people he disagreed with outside the USA was a moment for widespread rethinking of relationships.

Mary Trump: First of all, Andrew, it is so wonderful to see you in person and be here. Unfortunately, this is where we are though in terms of what is happening in the world because of the chaotic, I do not know if leadership is the right word, but the chaotic rule of Donald Trump. I think this has been a long time coming and it is a little surprising that it has taken so long for people to catch up. It is not just Donald imposing his will, it is Donald being willing to impose his will on behalf of malign actors like Vladimir Putin, for example.

The distinction between pursuing policies one might disagree with and actively colluding with adversaries of the United States is crucial. This is not simply an alternative approach to foreign policy or a difference of opinion about how America should engage with the world. This is the deliberate alignment of the executive office with hostile powers. This is the marshaling of American government resources in service of foreign adversaries. The implications of this shift cannot be overstated.

Andrew Marr: Do you understand why politics at his level has become so personalized? He clearly has something going on with Vladimir Putin, just like he clearly loathes President Zelenskyy.

Mary Trump: He is always been into dominance and he has always played a zero-sum game. And I think what we see playing out and have seen playing out for a long time now is his identification with people who in his view have total power, which is the only way to be strong in his view. And he has nothing but disdain for democratic leaders who understand the importance of diplomacy, statecraft, and compromise because he considers all of those things weaknesses. And now it is playing out in a way that is tragic and obscene, quite frankly.

This is perhaps the most revealing aspect of his entire worldview. To Donald, strength is singularly defined as absolute power with no constraints, no oversight, and no accountability. Everything else registers as weakness. Democracy itself, with its requirements for negotiation and its distribution of power, appears to him as fundamentally weak. Leaders who govern through persuasion and who understand that nations cannot exist in isolation are, in his view, failures. Leaders who use force without limitation, who brook no disagreement and who see other nations as rivals to be dominated rather than partners to be negotiated with, those are the leaders he admires and seeks to emulate.

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Andrew Marr: I was talking to Luke Harding, very experienced foreign correspondent for The Guardian. He has been around a long time, been in Russia a long time, knows the Putin regime pretty well, and he is convinced that President Putin has something, has compromat on Donald Trump. Do you agree with that?

Mary Trump: I think at this point that is undoubtedly true. I just do not know that it matters anymore because Donald is so entirely in Putin’s pocket and his, I do not want to say values, but his goals align with Putin’s goals. Also, because of the way things are going in America, I think Donald is beyond being taken down by some lascivious video of him, no matter how despicable, because he has conditioned his followers to accept any horror he is willing to commit.

The existence of compromising material on Donald has almost become academic. Whether Putin possesses damaging information or not is secondary to the far more immediate and terrifying reality, which is that Donald does not need to be blackmailed to serve Russian interests. His own psychology, his narcissism, his desperate need for admiration from strongmen, his complete indifference to the welfare of ordinary people, and his hunger for money and power have already aligned his interests perfectly with Russia’s. He would pursue Putin’s agenda with genuine enthusiasm. He sees it as strength. He sees it as what a real leader does.

Andrew Marr: This is emperor to emperor in a sense, but I think a lot of people have noticed a new level of heedlessness or aggression or whatever you describe it as in the last few weeks. He is becoming more angry, more Trump than he has been before. And I wonder if this is because the midterms are coming closer and he is frankly scared either of the loss of face or what happens to him in terms of being impeached if he loses both houses of Congress and this is coming closer and closer.

Mary Trump: Absolutely. The midterm elections in America in less than three weeks now look to be a massive defeat for Republicans. I do not want to say for sure that that is what is going to happen, but that is what it looks like. And that will be a massive defeat for Donald because it will expose him to accountability and investigations in the way he has not been because the Republicans have been in charge of everything. So it is sort of a perfect storm of his deterioration cognitively, emotionally, and psychologically. You mentioned the ways he is acting out, his disinhibition, his lack of impulse control, his self-aggrandizement, and combined all of those things with his desperation and that makes for a very volatile mix.

The stakes of what is happening politically cannot be overstated. Donald’s entire presidency has been predicated on the protection he receives from Republican majorities in Congress. The moment that shield is threatened, his behavior becomes increasingly erratic and dangerous. This is not coincidental. This is perfectly predictable based on an understanding of how men with his particular psychological makeup behave when they face the possibility of consequences. He does not retreat. He does not reflect. He escalates. He becomes more aggressive, more disinhibited, and more willing to deploy whatever tools he has available to protect himself.

Andrew Marr: I am frankly losing concentration on aspects of this story because it is so big, but is there an Epstein file aspect to this as well?

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Mary Trump: Yeah, I do not know if your viewers heard about this, but Donald gave a rally in Ohio and a protester stood up and said, “Release the Epstein Files.” And she was wearing a t-shirt that said that, which she was exercising her First Amendment rights. The crowd, people in the crowd started beating her up and Donald egged them on.

So clearly that is something that is under his skin for sure. The mention of Epstein, the request for the release of files, the simple presence of someone asking this question in public is enough to provoke a response of extraordinary venom. He does not defend himself. He does not deny anything. He attacks. He demeans. He encourages violence against the protester. He predicts violence will happen to her at home. He calls her mother and father into the picture, suggesting they deserve to suffer. This is the behavior of someone who has something to hide. This is the behavior of someone who is genuinely frightened of exposure.

Andrew Marr: Let me ask about another aspect of your uncle’s behavior. And I want to choose my words very carefully because there is something almost childish in what he is doing at the moment. We had tragic case here of a man jumping, a man who was mentally unwell, jumping into the enclosure of a Siberian tiger and getting mauled to death. And the president of the United States reacted to this story by releasing an artificial intelligence generated video of him wrestling with the same tiger. I just find that. I mean, I have got fairly high levels of amazement fatigue these days, but even I was just completely flabbergasted.

Mary Trump: Yeah. I think even though we should never be surprised by anything he does, we should reserve the right to be shocked. Now what he did by releasing the video of that tragedy was just unspeakable anyway. It showed complete disregard for the family or the impact it could have on people watching it. But his video of himself killing a tiger as if that is a thing that could ever happen points to what you are talking about, this level of prepubescent arrogance and this sense of his own mortality, immortality I should say, and his completely warped idea that he is the killer his father always wanted him to be. It is all playing out.

This moment encapsulates something essential about his psychology that I have been trying to communicate for years. When confronted with a genuine human tragedy, his immediate response is not empathy or reflection or even political calculation. His immediate response is to co-opt the tragedy and use it as a vehicle for his own aggrandizement. He creates a fantasy video of himself as a powerful man, as a killer, as someone who can do what this man could not do. The person who died and the suffering of their family are completely immaterial to him. They are not even background noise. They are simply content. They are simply an opportunity for him to reinforce his own image of power and dominance.

What is particularly revealing is that he is no longer capable of even maintaining a facade of empathy. There was a time when he performed sadness at funerals. There was a time when he at least pretended to care about the suffering of others. That time has passed. Now he does not bother with the performance. He releases an artificial intelligence video of himself wrestling a tiger that just mauled a man to death. He is telling us exactly what he thinks. He is telling us that he is powerful and others are weak. He is telling us that death and suffering are entertainment, that they are content for him to use.

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Andrew Marr: So given that he thinks of himself as a killer, given that the huge electoral pressure is really on him now, what is your worst fear about what happens if he loses badly in the midterms?

Mary Trump: There will not be sufficient power to reign him in. That is why I think it is extremely important, especially if the Democrats win in the midterms and get majorities and can start holding him accountable and slowing down the process of his degradation of America and our alliances, but also other countries need to start reigning him in and hopefully what is happening in Ukraine is a wake-up call.

My fear is not abstract. It is grounded in understanding how men like Donald behave when they face consequences. They do not retreat into private life. They do not accept responsibility. They lash out. They escalate. They find ways to punish those who oppose them. The only check on his behavior has been the protection of Republican majorities in Congress. The moment that shield is removed, there is very little institutional restraint on what he might do. This is where international pressure becomes essential. This is where other nations have to understand that appeasement will not work. Capitulation will not work. Only pushback will work.

Andrew Marr: Well, I was going to ask you about other countries because this is a genuinely perilous moment. So how do you think other countries, other Western nations in particular, should react to it?

Mary Trump: They need to disabuse themselves of the notion that capitulating to him is going to get them anything because clearly they have tried that and what does he do? He goes against his word. He does whatever he wants to do anyway, and he continues to erode our alliances. He is much more aligned with Putin and Kim Jong-Un than he is with any of our NATO allies, and he has betrayed Ukraine in a way that is obscene. So world leaders need to come together and recognize that the only way to mitigate the damage he is doing is to try to stop him at every turn and not give into him.

This is the central message that needs to be heard by every democratic leader in the world. There is no negotiation with someone like Donald. There is no compromise that will be honored. There is no agreement that will be respected if it no longer serves his interests or his mood. There is no consistency to his positions. There is only his will and his needs and his desires. The only language he understands is strength, and strength in this context means unity. It means democratic nations standing together and refusing to be divided by his promises or his threats. It means making clear to him and to Putin that there are consequences for betrayal.

The tragedy is that this should not even need to be said. The Western alliance has survived and thrived for nearly eight decades because of shared values and mutual commitment. The nations of Europe and North America have stood together through decades of conflict and crisis. Now we are in a position where we have to fight to preserve that alliance against someone who claims to represent one of the founding nations of that alliance. It is an inversion of everything we thought we knew about American foreign policy and American leadership. It is a moment of profound danger.

Andrew Marr: Thank you so much for coming in for what has been candidly an alarming conversation, Mary Trump. Thank you so much.

Mary Trump: Thank you. The conversation continues in the comments. So let us know what you think.

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How could we possibly forget? The chainsaw antics, Dogecoin antics, and the destruction of federal agencies and programs have characterized Elon Musk’s arrival in D.C. He came promising to cut $2 trillion in government spending, but three months later, he left having fallen spectacularly short. Why? Because he lacked a workable plan and a clear understanding of the task at hand. His goal wasn’t to eliminate fraud and waste within the federal government; it was simply to redirect funds from essential programs to benefit himself, Donald, and their circle.

On May 30, 2025, Elon Musk announced his departure from the Trump regime, leaving the Oval Office with a black eye. I have no idea who gave it to him, but I’m sure the line of people wanting to do so was long. I do know, however, that Donald didn’t give it to him, after all, Donald is a physical coward. The split between Elon Musk and Donald was inevitable. Two raging narcissists, each desperate to be the center of attention, their clash was bound to turn messy.

Fast forward to 2026, and they’ve clearly made up. As we head into the midterms, Musk, along with his nearly trillion-dollar fortune, is back in the game. Thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts and the corrupt illegitimate supermajority of the Supreme Court, Musk is now able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Republican candidates.

According to Pete Hegseth, Elon is also going to advise the Pentagon on the future of warfare, something relevant to which he knows as much as Donald and Pete themselves, which is to say, absolutely nothing. What could possibly go wrong? The answer is that everything could, and a lot already has. Musk owns the artificial intelligence company behind Grok, which he merged with SpaceX earlier this year.

On October 12, the AP reported that Musk contributed over $276 million to Republican political operations since July. For perspective, Musk spent approximately $290 million during the entire 2023-2024 election cycle, during which he became one of Donald’s most important backers. Of the $276 million contributed since July, $158 million went to the Senate Leadership Fund supporting Republican Senate candidates, and $76 million to his America PAC, focused on voter outreach and turnout. That’s just the money we know about.

An October 12 investigation by the New York Times revealed Musk had also made seven-figure donations through dark-money organizations that aren’t required to disclose their donors. This means the $366 million he’s contributed during the current election cycle doesn’t include everything he spent trying to influence American elections. The full amount remains unknown, highlighting why we cannot have billionaires in control and certainly not trillionaires.

This is also why most justices in John Roberts’ Supreme Court, that illegitimate corrupt supermajority, need to be impeached and removed as soon as the Democrats regain the majority. On September 30, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced an initiative at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. He proclaimed:

Today we are leveraging a unique source of American advantage, one our adversaries do not have, our innovators, our senior leaders, and our technologists, big thinkers and doers who will forecast creative solutions for tomorrow’s conflicts. That’s why today, at my direction, I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds.

Speaker relationships reveal the absurdity behind this claim. Wow. If Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich are among our best minds, we are in big trouble. I didn’t even know Newt was still alive, and frankly, I have no clue who Palmer Luckey is. This marks Musk’s first official return to advising the Trump regime since the very public fallout over Dogecoin and other escapades. It’s worth mentioning that both Musk and Luckey run companies that sell technology to the military, a convenient overlap.

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Musk is the founder and CEO of SpaceX, a vital federal contractor in space and defense. In May 2026, SpaceX received approximately $6.5 billion in Pentagon contracts associated with Donald’s absurd Golden Dome Missile Defense Initiative.

On July 29, the U.S. Space Force, which I still keep forgetting exists, awarded the company another $1.6 billion for 18 Falcon 9 launches carrying military satellites through 2027. This relationship with the federal government extends beyond military contracts. SpaceX holds major NASA contracts and provides satellite communications through Starlink. Donald’s oldest, and perhaps most useless, child is also involved, he’s a partner at 1789 Capital, which has invested in both SpaceX and Anduril. Just more delightful coincidences, right?

Musk’s Tesla is also developing Optimus, a humanoid robot designed to perform everyday tasks. They promote a future where these robots integrate into daily life, but there’s another potential market for advanced robotics you might not expect.

Optimus, supposedly built to make everyday life easier, knows how to take care of more than just people. Its purpose expands into surveillance and, potentially, weaponry. In September 2024, the U.S. Army tested a robotic dog equipped with a rifle and an AI-enabled targeting system in Saudi Arabia. Autonomous warfare is now a reality, part of Pete Hegseth’s project to turn the Department of Defense into an organization singularly focused on lethality.

Musk’s recent re-emergence into the Trump regime leads to all sorts of ominous developments. On October 8, the Washington Post reported Donald’s financial disclosures included a purchase of between $1 million and $5 million in SpaceX bonds, signed into existence just two days before a new national space transportation policy memorandum.

This memorandum instructs federal agencies to expand commercial launch capacity and facilitate permitting and environmental reviews—a blatant favor to SpaceX, which has been awarded significant contracts. The White House claims Donald’s investments are managed by third-party institutions, yet we know that transactions don’t magically happen without some oversight.

To honor Musk at a ceremony in Washington D.C., Donald remarked:

Quite honestly, there’s nobody like him. Few Americans in history have done more to advance America’s national interest than Elon.

What’s particularly galling is that Donald praised Musk while simultaneously withholding over a billion dollars in appropriated funding from the National Science Foundation. Scientists have warned that cuts to research have undermined American scientific leadership. Arati Prabhakar, previously directing the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, compared the Trump regime’s actions to moving American science back to the Stone Age.

In recognizing Musk, who largely contributed to diminishing funding for critical science initiatives, we must understand the broader implications of this partnership. Musk once said, “Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes.” Yes, that may well be true considering the hands in which AI currently rests, but more dangerous than AI by far are the people running those companies, and of course, Donald.

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[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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Mary Trump: A public execution carried out by our military to be live streamed. That is a line we do not want to cross, but that is the line Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth wanted us to cross. The only way Donald could make this worse, and I’m very afraid we’re heading in this direction, is to make this event, this public execution, pay-per-view.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat from the essential SubStack Lucid has been writing about this. She obviously understands the historical context in which this is happening better than most. For me personally, emotionally, it felt like we have crossed a line and that this is something we do not come back from if indeed just even talking about it is problematic. Ruth discussed this in the context of trial balloons, which Donald is expert at floating. But just as an expert in the history of fascism, she can help us understand why this is a line we should never even contemplate crossing.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Trump has been, for a decade, speaking about violence and speaking about how we need to hurt each other more as part of a kind of emotional and political reeducation of Americans to create a climate conducive to this. He started this in the campaign of 2016, he did it in 2020, and of course there was January 6th, and then the campaign for 2024. He is trying to create a climate conducive to having people accept violence as part of governance, as a necessary part of governance. The case of the live stream represents one aim: to desensitize the public to violence, to make them complicit by watching it as though it were entertainment. And then the last thing is that this is also targeted to the military. It is designed to domesticate and really delegitimize the military as a democratic institution, and it makes the military complicit.

A lot of my work on fascism and Chile and Pinochet examined what happens when militaries make themselves the tools of spectacles of violence. This is why it felt particularly like an escalation.

Mary Trump: Luckily people have been speaking out, former military and even Republicans, which you can never count on them to be on the right side of things. Admiral William McRaven had a piece in the Atlantic in which he called public execution shameless and ignoble. I want to start by looking at this narrowly. This is not about the death penalty. It does not matter what you think about the death penalty. This is about something else entirely.

Something we have talked about before is the ways in which Donald uses micro-aggressions to soften the ground to get people to accept worse outcomes. We went from his telling police cadets about not worrying so much about protecting someone’s head when putting him in the back of a police car to now talking about executing somebody. I do want to say, Ruth, that I think it is very important that this is not about trying to generate sympathy for Nidal Hassan. He committed a horrific, unspeakable crime for which he must be punished. This is not about that either. This is about the ways in which it degrades us, but also the ways in which it can backfire. This is the logical conclusion to where Donald started ten years ago.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: It is no accident that his escalation and his wanting to do more and more violent spectacles is coming now because as his popularity decreases, he feels more desperate and impotent with the midterms coming up. The way these people think, and you are the psychologist here, their megalomania and their denial of reality increases. We have seen recently an escalation to wanting to annihilate entire peoples. He repeatedly talked about annihilating Iran, including at the UN, and that has its own logic because he is trying to discredit the UN because it is democratic. But then he also talked about Iran maybe taking out entire cities, and of course they are Californian cities in a state that has a democratic governor. He said they could take out a city, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. In the essay I just published on Lucid, I talk about this as trial balloons.

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It is very unclear whether this live stream will go forward, the execution, because he is having second thoughts. But he knows that one of his goals, his propagandistic goal, his reeducation goal, his exposure goal has already been met because everybody is talking about it. The trial balloon is when you put into circulation an extreme or heinous idea and people talk about it, both people who like it and then people who think it is disgusting. It gets talked about and then it becomes a thing. It becomes a thing that could be possible. It is a thing that is out there. Even if you cannot do it now, you can do it in the future. Trump has had this idea for years to use firing squads. I started my essay with reporters at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone talking about this in 2023.

Now is his big chance, but because he is declining in every possible way, physical, mental, and politically, he is grasping at something that can make his mark on history. A large scale thing, live stream and execution, annihilate a whole people. This is why it is very dangerous right now.

Mary Trump: I do not know that we have ever been at a more dangerous point for the reasons you just said. You are right that he often floats it, sees how it plays, plants the seed, and then revisits it later. The only time I have ever seen him abandon one completely was when he was in a rally in 2020, and he was talking positively about a COVID vaccine and the crowd booed him. He never ever heard that again. Of course, that was not violence. That was actually a good, positive thing that he was promoting, but it got rejected out of hand. He is not interested in things that are therapeutic or good for us in any way. But the violence will be something that he hangs on to. Based on what you have said in terms of his deterioration across pretty much every category of what it is to be human, it is a form of self-soothing.

It is born out of his and Pete Hegseth’s deep insecurities because it was Hegseth who first said this publicly from what I understand. This is a perfect storm of problems for us because, as you certainly know, Donald is a nihilist. If he feels threatened, he will do whatever he needs to do to protect his ego. I think that is also where the spectacle comes in and you use Muammar Qaddafi as a test case of how that played out and how he used the violent spectacle to entertain and degrade his people. Do you see us tending towards that? Do you see Donald tending towards that?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Qaddafi came to power late in the 1960s in a coup and he lasted 42 years because he had oil. But each of these strongmen uses the media system that is most common in their day. He used television and he televised executions. It is totally ghoulish, and I did not enjoy writing about this for Strongmen. Television was the way he would have televised executions of students and other people. He would have televised trials and then you could see they were beaten up and sometimes they would come back for a sequel. He staged spectacles in a depraved manner. He made school children come to a stadium to see a dissident being hanged, and that was the field trip. It is live spectacle, but it is also televised spectacle.

When Trump and those around him are doing AI things and generating this constant stream of fantasies that are both grandiose and also violent, this is just the latest chapter using social media and now AI to generate spectacles. From Mussolini forward when he had newsreels and Hitler with radio broadcasting violent fantasies, they knew that having people imagine violence and having that be part of everyday life is crucial to having them accept violence and believe that it is part of how you have to govern in order to insert the narrative, save white people, save civilization, prevent communism from taking hold. Whatever the narrative is, violence has to be the answer. You have to desensitize people to violence. Hegseth is the one who first proposed this publicly, and he has been reducing the mighty and powerful US military’s mission to what he calls lethality. He has his own fixations with violence. It is all he talks about: lethality. It is not defending democracy. It is not making the world safe. It is lethality, which is killing people.

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Mary Trump: That is born out of their insecurity about their own idea of what it is to be masculine in part. You mentioned, of course, that one thing Donald does understand and is quite savvy about is visual spectacle, the aesthetics of that. We have seen him try in the last almost two years now to put on spectacles like the UFC cage match on the White House lawn, the bizarre Formula One race thing in DC, and of course building monuments to himself, naming everything after himself. But I think what is going to be a problem for us is that he is recognizing that spectacle alone is not enough and that violence is integral to what is going to come next. The violence will not work permanently, but the violence will make him feel better at least momentarily. That is why, as you point out, the rhetoric is getting increasingly extreme. I do think, as you mentioned, he is stepping back from this because it is not getting picked up the way he probably would have hoped, but it will resurface.

Even if there is not a public execution carried out by the US military, which would degrade them and all of us, there may well be in the future. The narrative is in our culture now. We are now a people who have considered this abomination. I think the one piece that is missing though is Donald monetizing this in some way. When I first heard this, I was like ten dollars, he is going to make this a pay-per-view event. Given the way things like prediction markets and sports betting are just driving so much of our economy and everything is getting gamified, I am really worried that when he does revisit this next time, that is where he is going to go.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I would not be surprised because one of the things I am always trying to figure out is how what we are living through resembles in some way other autocrats, past or present, and how it is a little different. But one thing is the commercial entertainment, the melding and blending of politics and entertainment. Berlusconi in Italy, who is also in my book, was a creature of television. He did this too, but not to the extent of Trump. In particular, he had spectacles of sexism and so does Trump, but I have totally forgotten about that cage match. This is how many things are going on. That is a good example because this is a commercial enterprise that took place on the White House lawn. It is part of the corruption stuff that everything is privatized, and there we had the spectacle of violence, so it is appropriate to talk about now.

It is this toxic coming together of violence, entertainment, propaganda, machismo, and lawlessness. We see it on the streets with ICE, and that is their culture too. An important thing is that when you are living through ascending authoritarianism, you have to watch what happens to institutions and the party, who has to leave because they are too law abiding and who instead comes in. We know ICE has been hiring people with a lot of domestic abusers and criminals. They are not interested in training them for that long. The GOP also has a lot of people with legal problems, corrupt people. When you fill the institutions, especially the ones with interface with the public, you get executions on the street. In a way, we have been seeing executions in the Twin Cities, in LA, and now in New York.

A culture is formed from the bottom up, from paramilitaries and militias that you see in other countries, gangs who collaborate with the government like under Duterte. You see this everywhere. It is a lawlessness. It is a broader cultural shift that Trump and Hegseth are trying to carry out. That is what is really terrifying because it is from above, but it is also from below. There is the violence as entertainment. That is something that Trump, the reality TV host, brings to this authoritarian playbook.

Mary Trump: Nobody is stopping them. That is clearly a big part of the problem. This has not happened yet. I think if it does, then we have crossed a line that we do not come back from. The reality is that Donald is not, unless the universe is much crueler than I give it credit for, going to be around for 40 years. I do not think there is anybody to fill the void he will leave, thankfully.

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So to the extent that it is possible, what do we need to do in order to immunize ourselves against such depredations and how do we recover to the extent that is possible?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: As you know, I am writing a book on resistance. I have been talking about this value shift, lawlessness, and machismo, but there is a counter value system. Love is part of it. Togetherness, solidarity, unity. When Elon Musk, the former co-president in 2025 and now coming back to the Pentagon, talks about empathy being suicidal, we have to flip this. We know from resistance all over the world that empathy and love, however we are defining it, civic love, love for your neighbor, Christian or other religious love, is key to getting out of this mess. From that comes solidarity. Solidarity is not just a word, it is a practice on the ground. We saw it in the Twin Cities during the militarized occupation. It is mutual aid. That is what we do and that is what we have been doing. There is a way out of this.

The last thing I would say is that there are studies showing that you can get rid of an autocrat. But if you do not do this value shift to replace or at least start to replace this lawless culture, another autocrat could come back because legal reforms and institutional reforms are not enough. You have to have an on the ground shift of values to support democracy. That is where we have to work.

Mary Trump: Absolutely. It is not an accident that these people, including the oligarch tech bros, attack things like empathy. It is part and parcel of why Donald has championed cruelty and has tried to convince us that kindness is weakness somehow, because that is the family he grew up in, in which kindness, empathy, generosity, and sensitivity were all seen as weak and feckless and unmanly. I love the idea that resistance is love and resistance is solidarity and resistance is radical acts of empathy and kindness. People are finally starting to recognize just how far down this very dangerous road they have taken us. The lines in the sand are being drawn. As Donald gets more dangerous and more violent and more grasping, people are seeing it for what it is. If there is a good thing that we could say about this current time, it is that.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Your work and your books have been absolutely fundamental. You have been saying this for years, and the title of your Substack, The Good in Us, is part of it. We cannot allow the autocrats to make us our worst selves because Donald wants everybody to be like him, and that way he can do everything he wants to do with no pushback. But we are not like him. The good in us is very, very important to cultivate because the bad actors are cultivating other things. You have been absolutely fundamental in giving this message.

Mary Trump: You jumped on my line because I was about to say the same thing about your work. Seriously, Lucid is an essential Substack. It is compulsory. I like to assume that everybody watching has already subscribed, but if you have not, go subscribe now. Also, your book, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, was fundamental in helping me understand what we are living through from a historical perspective. Your work continues to be vital and resonant. Everybody should go subscribe to Lucid and buy Strongmen. Let us get it back on the New York Times bestseller list because it should be. It should never leave the New York Times bestseller list.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I like that idea.

Mary Trump: I like that idea too. If I could get a commission, that would be great, but it is not necessary. Just kidding. Seriously, Ruth, I am so grateful to have you in my life and so grateful that you keep raising your voice and staying in this fight because we desperately need you.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Well, thank you. It is always a pleasure and full of respect and admiration. And thanks to everyone for watching us. These hearts are for you.

Mary Trump: Yeah, we had a wonderful turnout. Thank you everybody so much. Thank you, Ruth.

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What we are witnessing is not politics as usual. It is the deliberate attempt to normalize the unthinkable through spectacle, violence, and the systematic erosion of democratic institutions. History offers warnings about what comes next if we do not resist with love, solidarity, and unwavering commitment to our values.

Subscribe to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Lucid on Substack for ongoing analysis of authoritarian patterns and resistance. Buy her book Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present to deepen your understanding of how we got here and what comes next.

Katie Phang

Live with Ruth Ben-Ghiat & Katie Phang

What an absolute privilege to be able to spend this time with Ruth Ben-Ghiat and to hear her incredible insight into predators like Silvio Berlusconi and Mobutu Sese Seko and the parallels with the Epstein Elite…

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10 days ago · 1888 likes · 116 comments · Katie Phang and Ruth Ben-Ghiat

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Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of Trump Trolls Trump. It has been 635 interminable days since Inauguration Day, January 20th, 2025. But there’s good news. The midterm elections are just 17 days away. So first up, make sure your voter registration is up to date. And if you can vote early, please do so. As always, we are here to ridicule and mock mercilessly this inept, corrupt, and dangerous regime.

Let’s dive right in with a truism that has become increasingly difficult to deny. Donald lies like most people breathe. In fact, I think in some cases he lies more fluently than I breathe. It’s second nature to him at this point, or maybe it’s just his nature.

Sometimes those lies get us into serious trouble. Earlier we saw Donald promising, as he has done time and time and time again, that he would bring energy prices down by 50 percent. That hasn’t happened. And actually the very opposite has happened because his war on Iran, his war of choice, has helped drive energy prices up across the board.

I think it’s worth remembering that Donald lied about this too, because back in 2024 when he was asking Americans to put him back in the White House, which sadly 78 million of us thought was a good idea, this is what he had to say.

We will expel the war mongers from our government. Look at Trump. Just look at this guy. He’s going to go to war. He’s going to take us. No, no. Look at me. I’m the one that kept us out of war. I’m the only president that didn’t start a war. I didn’t start a war. Started no war. I was the first president in decades who started no new war. There are wars all over. He said, “Bring back Trump. It’ll all end. It all ended. We had no problem. I’m going to keep you out of wars. I kept you out of wars. We had no wars with Donald Trump as your president. Remember when crooked Hillary Clinton used to say, “He’s going to get us into a war. Look at him. Look at his rhetoric.” I said, “No, my rhetoric’s going to keep us out of wars.

Really? Threatening genocide is not going to keep us out of wars. Oh, wait a second. He’s threatening genocide against the country he went to war with, an unprovoked war of choice. No one knows how long this war is going to last because he keeps lying about that too. In fact, he told us it would be a matter of days or a couple of weeks. It’s been over six months.

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The truth of the matter is, although we are actively still at war with Iran, a war that is expanding because Donald has completely lost control of it, we lost simply by getting involved. Back in June, Vice President Baby JD Vance told us that a deal with Iran was just around the corner. So it isn’t just Donald who is lying to our faces about how things are going. This is Vance in an interview with Robert Costa on CBS’s Sunday morning recorded on June 9th.

Right now, I feel that we are in a position to get a deal that is good for the United States economically and that really does deal with the Iranian nuclear program, not just now, not just while Donald Trump is president, but for the long term, to where my kids can say when they’re adults, Iran is not going to have a nuclear weapon. That’s the goal of the policy, and I think we’re very close to achieving that goal, but we still got some wood to chop and we’re going to keep doing it. You say very close. How soon could the deal happen before the midterm elections? Oh, absolutely. No, I think we’re going to know a lot before the midterm elections. Look, I think that the deal could happen in the next week, but the deal could also happen months from now.

Well, it’s not like there’s much difference between a week and months from now. Before the midterm elections though, absolutely, which as I mentioned, are only 17 days away. Also, remember the goal of this war is to make sure that Iran doesn’t have nuclear capability. And if that’s really what Donald and his ilk were interested in, then guess what he shouldn’t have done? Rip up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran nuclear deal, which actually had Iran agreeing not to develop nuclear weapon capability. These guys cannot win for losing.

Speaking of which, back in April, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott appeared on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo. Remember her? I mean, I know she is much missed and lamented, but Scott’s message was simple. Sure, the war is raging kind of out of control. Sure, prices are rising, but don’t worry your pretty little heads about that. Everything’s on track. And we of course have Donald to thank for all of that. Scott had another message for the American people though, and this is what it was.

Great news, by the way. The fact of the matter is that all of the cylinders are kicking. It is good news. You can even feel in our environment how good things are getting. Gas prices continue to come down, which means that your groceries will come down a little bit as well. We’ve got a lot of good signs in the economy. We just need to continue to execute and have confidence in the choices the American people have made by making President Trump their president and keeping Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. Let me just say for the average person in the country, President Trump loves you.

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Well, I don’t know. Does he? Considering he doesn’t know what love is, I find that highly suspect and untrue. Gas prices are coming down, aren’t they? Well, no, they’re not, because Brent crude oil is now over 105 dollars a barrel, which translates to diesel, the stuff that trucks need to get around, at 6.27 dollars a gallon. So I don’t think Donald loves you. The economy is not doing well.

As I mentioned, with the midterms this close, I can’t wait until I can actually say the midterms are two weeks away. But Donald, he’s not quite taking in what’s happening. How does he think things are doing? How does he think he’s doing? Because really, that’s the only thing he’s concerned about. Well, let me ask you this question. If Donald were asked to grade his own performance on the economy, what grade do you think he would give himself in the midst of economic catastrophe?

We’re doing an unbelievable job. Costs are coming way down. I inherited very, very high costs and they’re all coming down now. The food, the groceries, it’s all coming down. We’ve done a great job. I think we should be giving an A plus on the economy, but I think it’s coming. People are starting to talk about it.

Interviewer: I do want to talk about the economy, sir, here at home, and I wonder what grade you would give.

A plus, Donald responds.

A plus, the interviewer repeats.

Yeah. A plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, Donald says.

Well, it makes sense that he would give himself a grade that doesn’t exist. Now, Donald is laser focused on the needs of the American people. He’s working day and night to make sure that our lives are improved. I mean, you can tell by the fact that crews are working around the clock to get the ballroom built. That’s not making my life better. He’s making oil deals with Russia to help refill their much depleted coffers to aid them in attacking our ally Ukraine. That’s definitely not making my life better.

Unfortunately though, according to him and his enablers, we’re still dealing with the damage Joe Biden left behind. Donald has a few words for his predecessor. Donald has told us that he is working his considerable ass off.

He has one ability I don’t have. He sleeps. He can sleep. This guy goes on a beach and he lays down on one of those beach chairs. They weigh six ounces and he can’t lift it, but he has an ability to fall asleep while on camera. He can lie down on one of those things and in minutes, he’s stone cold out. How does he do it? And he’s got cameras because he’s in prison, so they have cameras on him. And then they show him sleeping on the beach. You’ll never see me sleeping in front of camera. I have to tell you, he’s a different guy. He looks different than he used to. He acts different than he used to. He’s even slower than he used to be. And I wouldn’t say he’s at the top of his game. Would you think their message is Sleepy Joe because he’s not all there? Right now, I think I’m sharper than I was 25 years ago, but who the hell does? You’ll never see me sleeping in front of Joe.

I mean, that’s the reaction to listening to Donald talk about himself because I have never seen a sleepier person. That hypersomnia is not a good thing, but it’s so much nicer when he’s sleeping, isn’t it? Again, as we’ve talked about before, Donald is a master of projection, and clearly when he’s talking about Sleepy Joe Biden, he’s talking about himself because I have never met such a hypersomnolent person in my life. Although to be fair, sleepy Donald is my favorite mode of Donald.

I want to turn now to Donald’s relentless crusade against corruption. Wait a minute, sorry. Is crusade a synonym for embrace? Embrace of corruption? Well, let’s find out.

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We know that Baby JD Vance is in charge of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which is fabulous. This was established by executive order back in March. The only thing that surprised me about that is that he didn’t ask Elon Musk or Ken Paxton to head that task force, but we’re talking about criminals here, hardened criminals, and Donald, as is his want, is looking at them very strongly, which is a phrase I still cannot make sense of. I do not know what it means to look at something very strongly. I think Superman was able to do that, but he had laser beams coming out of his eyes.

Now, Donald explains exactly what he has done to crack down on criminality. Before you get excited, it does not mean he’s had himself arrested. As I listen to him describe these criminals, I have a lingering question. You may have the same one, here is what he said:

91 percent of the crime in Washington DC, as an example, was caused by 2.1 percent of the population. These are many career criminals, sick people, mental problems.

Okay. I mean, I know DC’s a small town, but I didn’t think it was so small that Donald comprised 2.1 percent of the population. Oh wait, but it’s not just him. He has a lot of co-conspirators out there. If you add in all of his co-conspirators, then maybe yes, those hardened career criminals, the Vances and the Hegseths and the Musks and the Bessents and all of them might indeed make up 2.1 percent of the DC population, and they are absolutely committing over 90 percent of the crime there.

As we approach the midterms, please, please make sure your voter registration is up to date and know where your polling location is. Check both of those things repeatedly because people can get struck off the voter rolls without their knowing it right before the election, and sometimes polling places change. Republicans are going to pull out all the stops, so we need to stay on top of this.

You don’t want any surprises when you go to vote on election day if you vote in person. A lot of states offer early voting, so check your options and if you can vote early, please do so. I am one of those people. I’m old school. I like to go vote on election day, but vote early, vote by mail in states where you still think that’s the safe thing to do.

And when you step into that voting booth, remember how we got here and who brought us to this very dark time in our history. Encourage other people to vote and remind them that Donald himself said he wants us to pretend he’s on the ballot. So that’s very clear. Vote Democratic up and down the ballot.

“I can always say that the next president will get a lot of credit for what I’ve done. Please remember it was me, not them,” Donald says.

Oh, we will remember. We will remember. And as we’re remembering, we are going to tear down everything on the planet that has your name on it.

Thank you so much for joining us for Trump Trolls Trump week 91. Remember, mockery is our superpower, and we will be here every single week to call out the hypocrisy, the ineptitude, and the outright corruption of this incredibly dangerous and misguided regime.

Go vote.

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We’ve known this for a while now, but every accusation Donald makes is really a confession. He uses words like corrupt, crooked, fake, dishonest, criminal, incompetent, weak, crazy, rigged, and dumb to describe people he doesn’t like. He has used these words so often and for so long that they have become part of his shtick. They have also become part of the rhetoric of many of the people who still support him. How many times have we watched a congressional hearing in which somebody in Donald’s orbit is asked a direct question, only to watch them look down at their notes for the person or institution they’re supposed to blame in order to deflect instead of answering the question?

The pattern is unmistakable at this point. When confronted with an uncomfortable question, Donald or somebody in his orbit redirects the accusation outward. Sometimes they combine projection with deflection and attack the person who asked the question in the first place. Donald will tell a reporter that she doesn’t smile enough, call her piggy, or describe her as stupid, nasty, crooked, or corrupt. It’s all an effort to shift attention away from the question he doesn’t want to answer and the fact that he fails to answer it.

Projection is a very basic and quite common defense mechanism in which a person attributes thoughts, feelings, impulses, or characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to somebody else. This isn’t hypocrisy, because projection is unconscious much of the time. It is literally outside of conscious awareness. When Donald says that somebody is stupid, has a low IQ, or is corrupt, criminal, or traitorous, he is literally talking about himself. He just isn’t aware of it because acknowledging those shortcomings in himself is unthinkable to him. To acknowledge them would be to admit that he is nothing he claims to be: smart, strong, sophisticated, and successful. The list goes on.

Projection is a way of making one’s problem somebody else’s problem. This is where the pattern of behavior matters. Again, it’s very common for people to get defensive and blame somebody else, especially when the thing about themselves is humiliating. But if a person repeatedly responds this way, we need to look more closely at what is happening.

As I discussed last week, Donald learned very early on that vulnerability, dependence, and failure were dangerous. How is that possible, you might ask? Well, his father, my grandfather Fred, divided the world into winners and losers, and he had deep seated contempt for people he considered losers, people like my dad. Being kind, empathetic, and sensitive, in addition to being vulnerable, also made you a loser in Fred Trump’s world.

What matters here is that Donald learned to deny those feelings and bury those characteristics that were intolerable to him. He knew that demonstrating them could get him literally and metaphorically killed, because that is exactly what he watched happen to my dad.

According to a Reuters investigation published in May 2026, Donald repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him at least 107 times in just six months. Nearly six years after losing that election by almost eight million votes to Joe Biden, Donald is still obsessed with finding a way to undo his loss.

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And just as a reminder, he also claimed that he won the popular vote in 2016. We know that, thanks to the tragedy of the Electoral College, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in that election by three million votes. Donald just squeaked in because of the Electoral College, which, of course, benefits small red states. So even though he won, so to speak, the 2016 election thanks to the Electoral College, he could not bear to admit that he had lost the popular vote. That’s why he started claiming that more than three million undocumented workers had voted. If not for that, he would have won the popular vote, too.

Fake may be one of the most frequently used words in Donald’s vocabulary. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, he has used the phrase “fake news” at least 1,628 times on social media since 2015. Meanwhile, The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims made by Donald during his first term, over four years. That’s an average of roughly 21 lies a day.

And I want to clarify something. Those are 21 lies a day that we know about, because who knows how many times he lies privately? So apparently, the easiest way to deal with an inconvenient fact, if you’re Donald, is to declare that the person repeating it is a liar or to make claims about that person that actually apply to you.

We’re talking about people like Jack Smith, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Letitia James. These are some of the people Donald has accused of criminal wrongdoing or suggested belong in prison.

Again, as I often say to him, Donald, stop looking in a mirror when you say these things. In June 2023, ABC News identified at least 27 political adversaries whom Donald had publicly suggested should be indicted or jailed since launching his first presidential campaign. When Donald himself faces criminal investigations, it’s the investigators who are criminals. The prosecutors pursuing those investigations are criminals, and the judges who rule against him according to the rule of law are the corrupt ones.

Donald can never be the bad guy in his own mind. He is full of grievance. He is the perpetual victim, and the rest of us can never, ever, ever be allowed to forget it.

So what happens when one person is unable to face reality? Donald doesn’t have to convince the entire country that his delusional framework is true, because the truth of the matter is that he is really just trying to convince himself. Unfortunately, there is a significant minority of people who are willing to go along with that delusional framework, in part because he is also an expert at convincing some very weak people, sometimes in very subtle ways, that they are responsible for assuaging his pain and supporting him no matter what.

They continue to support him even when doing so is to the detriment of their country and, quite frankly, to their own detriment.

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Watch the entire interview here:

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

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Mary Trump: Timothy Snyder, it is wonderful finally to be able to speak with you. First, I want to make sure everyone knows about your Substack, Thinking About, which has become an invaluable resource for me and many others. You recently posted a series called the Kharkiv Meditations, recorded during your latest trip to that border city in Ukraine. I found the ten meditations heartening, sobering, and hopeful. One thing I appreciate about your work, particularly this series, is your willingness to discuss morality, belief, hope, and even joy. Could you talk us through your trip and some of these meditations?

Timothy Snyder: I’m very happy to be here and looking forward to the conversation. I go to Ukraine because I’m a scholar of Ukraine, I have major projects there, and I have friends to see, both at the front and elsewhere. I go because I’m doing my job. I don’t mean that as a dig, because many people in this administration, and in the United States generally, ought to be going to Ukraine but aren’t, even though it is their job.

We have an enormous amount to learn about modern warfare, even from a narrow national security perspective, and we’re failing to learn it. Beyond that, there are deeper political and moral lessons to be learned from people facing extraordinarily challenging circumstances who nevertheless show up and do what needs to be done.

I was helping run a major history conference and took a few days to visit Kharkiv, a city extremely close to the Russian border. It is literally a frontline city, where the Russian advance was stopped and turned back. You can observe the front relatively easily and visit people defending it.

When you’re in Ukraine, you respect the air raid sirens, and you have time to yourself at night to think. That’s why I wrote the meditations. When you’re on the edge, you sometimes think better. You think differently when you’re sleepless or surrounded by people taking risks. Those circumstances came together and gave me the opportunity to write them.

Mary Trump: Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has been heartbreaking to witness. Saying the Biden administration’s response was woefully deficient is an understatement. Ukraine’s history and willingness to confront this hostile foreign power are humbling, but they also expose the deficiencies in our own response to aggression against Ukraine.

The first book of yours I read was Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It was extraordinarily difficult to read. We’re still dealing with the fallout from those horrors, yet the American government seems unwilling to recognize that this war against the Ukrainian people and their sovereignty is also a war against the Western democratic alliance. Ukraine isn’t just fighting for its own future. It’s fighting for all of us.

The Trump regime’s response has been abhorrent, and I don’t know whether we can even call ourselves Ukraine’s ally anymore. Yet Ukrainians continue to demonstrate an extraordinarily hopeful vision for the future. Their courage is remarkable.

You’ve described meditating on small acts of courage, moral language, doing one good thing, and the richness of language itself while you were in a war zone. What has your experience as a historian and your time with the Ukrainian people taught you about the possibility of hope during such dark times?

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Timothy Snyder: You can’t resist the worst without thinking about the best. You can’t oppose the other side’s bad ideas without having good ideas of your own, and you can’t do anything by yourself.

There are two questions here: why Ukraine matters and what we can learn from Ukrainians. Ukraine has repeatedly been central to world history, including both world wars and events going back hundreds or thousands of years. As a historian of the region, I continue to discover things that astonish me about its importance.

This war has lasted longer than the First World War and longer than the Second World War as the Russians count it. The casualties are immense. It is the defining modern war of the twenty first century, with two advanced sides using increasingly sophisticated technology.

The stakes extend beyond Ukrainian dignity, freedom, and sovereignty. They concern fundamental principles. Is it acceptable for one country to invade another, kidnap children, rape women, and murder civil society activists? Or are we in a world where such things can and should be resisted? That is an enormous question.

I was able to visit Kharkiv because friends drove me there, because I had friends at the front who invited me, and because organizations are doing the work that makes these visits possible. One positive lesson is the power of civil society.

By civil society, I simply mean groups outside government where people work together toward shared goals. For 25 years, Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated that people organizing together can make the difference, whether they’re defending democracy, fighting corruption, or resisting a foreign invasion.

That matters because we often think about politics as one election after another. In between, we feel alone and imagine that voting is the most we can do. That approach benefits authoritarians and aspiring tyrants like Donald Trump. We need to organize before and after elections, not just to win, but to ensure that victories hold and lead to meaningful change.

This kind of politics also feels better. When I’m in Ukraine, I’m often in a better mood because I’m surrounded by people who are more courageous and better organized than I am. That’s a useful rule everywhere: find people who are more courageous and organized than you are, then join them. If we follow that lead, I think things can turn out all right.

Mary Trump: That resonates with those of us watching the degradation of this country. This isn’t simply about winning an election. It’s about making the victory count. We can’t just promise to restore what existed before. We need to do something qualitatively different.

The system, as it currently exists and has been exploited, is designed to prevent fundamental structural change, even when Democrats hold power. Division and isolation are part of that process.

You describe fascism as a mechanism for denying reason, and you argue that resisting it means refusing to surrender to cynicism and scorn. You’ve also spoken about preventing our opponents from stealing our joy.

I appreciate that you talk about optimism, hope, and joy. Without a positive vision for the future, we risk repeating the past and ending up somewhere even worse. If winning is all we’re fighting for, what are we fighting for?

You’ve also written about the effort to convince people that government itself is the problem. Ronald Reagan famously promoted that idea, encouraging people to see government as a hostile force. What’s the antidote to that argument, which has been so successful on the American right?

Timothy Snyder: I want to return to what you said about the system. The U.S. system is designed in many ways to slow radical change, but we’ve added things the Constitution did not foresee that make matters worse. One is money in politics.

The founders weren’t anticipating super PACs. The idea that a Supreme Court calling itself originalist could imagine super PACs into existence and claim they are consistent with the founders is absurd.

If we want to unleash our imagination, we must constrain money in politics. We need to figure out how to do that. Money in politics doesn’t accelerate progress. It accelerates self destruction. It prevents effective policy because it gives donors’ interests and eccentric worldviews disproportionate influence, preventing government from functioning.

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We need to imagine how to get money out of politics after the Democrats win this election, which I expect them to do.

My book On Freedom addresses the broader question of government and freedom. Americans are right to care about freedom, but we’ve come to understand it incorrectly. We think freedom means having nothing stand in our way, and from there it’s easy to conclude that government must be bad because it creates obstacles.

But freedom isn’t simply about removing obstacles. It’s about what we could do if those obstacles weren’t there. It’s about the person we want to become and the good things we can bring into the world.

Freedom is a cooperative project. It isn’t just about being angry with government. It’s about forming a government that creates the conditions for people to become their best selves and bring good things into reality.

You can’t have freedom without government. You can’t have decency, dignity, prosperity, or health in a modern society of hundreds of millions of people without a functional government organized around what would benefit people.

We have to win that argument, but we also need to demonstrate what government can accomplish. Democrats could pass legislation showing that people don’t have to carry college debt or that everyone can have access to health care. Even if the president vetoes those laws, they would help people remember what government can do and imagine a better future.

Politicians also need to talk about how much better life could be. I don’t mean returning to the status quo. We could live longer, work less, send our children to better schools at lower cost, suffer less from disease, and live happier lives. If we don’t make the effort to imagine these possibilities, we can’t expect politicians to promise them or pursue what is possible.

Mary Trump: As you say, this is about remaking things, not simply repurposing them or going back to the way they were.

There are two conditions that make this moment different. First, our time to change the world for the better is limited by the climate crisis, which the people currently in power are hastening and exacerbating.

Second, wealth is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. Unlike in previous eras, the amount of money people can accumulate is essentially unlimited, putting tech bro oligarchs beyond the realm of ordinary human experience.

How do we confront that? Their argument seems nihilistic and antithetical to the changes you and I, along with many others, believe are necessary.

Timothy Snyder: Climate change and the tech bros are deeply connected. Data centers can worsen climate change, but the connection goes further. Both involve unsustainable extraction.

If we continue extracting coal, natural gas, and oil, we risk bringing our species to an end or leaving fewer people alive in unimaginably humiliating circumstances. The tech industry is also extractive. It treats our brains as targets for manipulation and profit, seeking to make us more obedient, less intelligent, and more predictable. Our increasingly limited wealth then flows into the hands of a very small number of people. Sadly, that is happening already.

Our limited time is part of the problem, but it can also be part of the solution because these companies can be regulated. Canada does it, although it could do more. The European Union does it, too.

I also think we should pursue a policy of billionaire export. We have more than enough billionaires. There’s an American fiction that we must keep them because they pay taxes. They often don’t. Their tax avoidance means everyone else pays more, while their activities are also subsidized by government.

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If we want everyone to be richer, we should be willing to let billionaires leave. They regularly threaten to go elsewhere. My response is that they should go. We have plenty, and we can share them with other countries. The funny thing is that many countries don’t actually want them.

The larger point is that wealth concentration can only be addressed through government policy. These people claim government is bad because they don’t want to pay taxes and are competing to accumulate ever more money. But wealthy people can be taxed. The fact that so few people now hold so much wealth strengthens the case for a functional government.

If billionaires move to Argentina or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter if they weren’t paying taxes here anyway. Companies such as Amazon and Facebook have also managed to avoid paying taxes. We need much stronger regulation of these companies and their profits.

The stakes of this election are therefore extremely high. It’s not just about good policy or climate change. It’s also about humanity.

Donald Trump has increasingly become a sock puppet for the tech bros. He’s weak and malleable. Flatter him a little, and he does what you want. If we have two more years of tech bro oligarchy, we’ll have a serious problem. Despite some differences among these people, their general project is to disable government and replace it with something else.

Mary Trump: As you say, they don’t believe in America. They aren’t even libertarians. They’re communists.

I want to end on a positive note, beginning with something you discussed a few months ago: superpower suicide, or attempted suicide. America, and certainly Donald, seems to be checking off all the boxes that could lead to the country’s suicide. These are choices we’ve made. Voters chose to put him back in office. We have problems with succession, ideology, the way he mishandles adversaries and mistreats allies, the destruction of education, and the rejection of science.

But often, the moments when things are most dire also present the greatest opportunities for positive change.

How do you see this country moving forward if Democrats win in November? And, crucially, what must happen if those who return to power understand what’s at stake and seize the opportunity to make this country and the world better?

Timothy Snyder: Those two parts of your question fit together because the important thing isn’t the election itself. It’s the sense of victory and responsibility that comes with it.

Things must already have been broken for Donald Trump to come to power, and he has wrecked an enormous amount with the help of many other people. But the systemic problems and the wreckage aren’t enough to get us to something better. Our choices are now something better or nothing at all.

We can’t simply return to the status quo or look for a middle ground that doesn’t exist. Given the systemic problems and the wreckage, we have no option but to try to build something much better. Anything else is cowardly and doomed to fail.

We must move from electoral victory to confidence in that victory, then to bold declarations and the beginnings of a vision. We need a vision of a country where government works, where people are prosecuted for corruption, where children have better opportunities than their parents, and where we get along with other countries.

But we must proceed step by step. We have to win, recognize that we’ve won, enforce that victory, and accomplish significant things as quickly as possible. Then we have to help people imagine how those achievements can lead to an America that is neither like the past nor the present, but something different and better.

Mary Trump: That also means all of us, as voters and people who care about democracy and this country’s future, must put pressure on those in power and make sure they understand what we require of them.

Timothy Snyder, it has been wonderful to have this opportunity to speak with you. Everyone should check out your Substack, Thinking About. Your interviews and observations are fantastic. Please read all of his books, from Bloodlands to On Tyranny to On Freedom, and everything in between.

This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.

Timothy Snyder: I’m glad I could do it. Great to meet you.

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Thinking about...

Modern Fascism, the Collapse of Truth, and Why Americans Need “Small Courage”

Dear thinkers…

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9 days ago · 462 likes · 67 comments · Timothy Snyder and Sharon McMahon

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Welcome back to The Art of the Scam, where we follow the dirty money powering the Trump regime.

Donald has spent the last year promoting the rapid construction of massive data centers as essential to America’s economic future. On July 23, 2025, Donald signed an executive order directing the federal government to accelerate data center construction by easing regulatory requirements and making federal land available for development. A year later, Donald was still personally making the sales pitch.

Here’s what he had to say about energy and the so called Green New Deal:

But the Democrats in Congress want less energy, not more. And if given the chance, they’d send your prices soaring and inflation skyrocketing, which is exactly what would happen if you had somebody else sitting in the position that I am right now.

And just like we did with the Green New Scam, where we were scammed, the whole country was, I wasn’t scammed. I got it right from the beginning. I got it from the first minute when I heard this crap. They were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful, except you couldn’t watch your television.

They wanted to watch the debate, Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden. Nobody could watch it because the wind wasn’t blowing. Remember that? “Darling, we’d like to watch the debate tonight.” “I’m sorry, the wind isn’t blowing.” No, that’s one of the great scams of all time.

Says the man who has spent the last year promoting data centers.

Donald also had something to say about the communities that don’t want data centers built in their backyards, for very valid reasons that we’ll get to later.

And the ones that don’t want it, the happiest people in the world are foreign countries, number one and number two, other communities within our country because they’re begging for them to be there. And some of them are great communities, very, very forward looking communities, very smart communities.

I’m not entirely sure how to make sense of that, except that Donald seems to be saying only smart people in smart communities want data centers. What he neglects to mention, because it’s inconvenient, is that he himself has millions of dollars invested in companies connected to the industry he’s promoting. In other words, as with pretty much any other venture in which he’s involved, including cryptocurrency and meme coins, it’s all a big grift designed to enrich him, his useless children, and his cronies, even if it’s terrible for the people of this country.

On October 1, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, also known as CREW, published an analysis of Donald’s 2026 financial disclosure. CREW identified 11 companies in Donald’s portfolio that own, operate, develop, or provide infrastructure for data centers. At the end of 2025, those investments were worth between $2.9 million and $9.5 million, an increase of at least 600 percent from the end of 2024.

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That doesn’t include his investments in Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, or Oracle, all companies that he has sued or settled with to enrich himself in exchange for deregulating them. Donald says he doesn’t direct his stock trades and that investment decisions are made by outside financial managers. According to CREW, those managers made 292 trades involving the 11 identified data center companies after Donald returned to office. I suppose we’re just supposed to believe that’s a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the Trump regime has continued making data center construction easier. In July, the EPA issued guidance giving developers greater flexibility to build their own power generation without being subject to one federal Clean Air Act program that applies to grid connected facilities.

One of the companies making enormous investments in the data center boom is SoftBank, the Japanese technology giant. Its subsidiary, SB Energy, is developing large scale energy and data center infrastructure in the United States. In January 2026, SoftBank donated $50 million to Donald’s Presidential Library Foundation. Two months later, the Departments of Energy and Commerce announced a public private partnership involving SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy to develop a massive AI data center on federal land in Portsmouth, Ohio.

The proposed project could use as much as 10 gigawatts of electricity, roughly enough to power 10 million homes. And that’s the part Donald doesn’t want to talk about. Data centers are destructive to the environment, and they consume enormous amounts of resources, including water and electricity, driving up costs for everybody else while providing no good in return.

These data centers have barely any need for human participation, so they aren’t creating jobs. They’re just another way to enrich Donald, his cronies, and his children at the expense of the American people, while our environment is degraded and our water supply is wasted.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, as well as Representative Melanie Stansbury, have questioned whether the $50 million contribution by SB Energy was connected to favorable treatment from the administration. My guess is yes.

Northern Virginia is already finding out what this data center boom means for local communities. The state has the largest concentration of data centers in the country, and a Virginia legislative study found that meeting even half of the projected data center demand would require increasing the state’s electricity generation capacity by 80 to 90 percent and its transmission capacity by 36 percent by 2040.

That same study modeled what the expansion could mean for Dominion Energy customers. Under its highest data center demand scenario, the generation and transmission portion of a typical residential electric bill would increase by $23 a month by 2030 and $37 a month by 2040, in 2024 dollars. Those estimates don’t include distribution charges or some additional transmission costs.

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And this isn’t just happening in Northern Virginia. As data centers consume a growing share of the country’s electricity, the cost of supplying that power is increasingly showing up in Americans’ electric bills. More Perfect Union looked at how this is already happening across the country.

When I noticed my electric bill had gone up, I started asking my neighbors, “Is your bill also going up?” And they had no idea that this was happening.

If you live in any of these states, your electric bill is higher this summer. It’s not because of anything you did. You’re paying more because the world’s biggest tech companies are building so many data centers.

I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time, but I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space.

The report also asked whether the United States was committed to building data centers across its 60 regions.

We are absolutely going to.

The report continued:

Big Tech’s quest for artificial intelligence is creating a tidal wave of new costs that are about to hit all of us, even if you live nowhere near a data center.

Another speaker explained the problem:

The big problem is that we’re all subsidizing the wealthiest corporations in the world in their pursuit of artificial intelligence.

And the result?

Americans’ utility bills are rising while Big Tech’s profits are going through the roof.

Seventy five percent of Americans say they oppose having a data center built near where they live. And yet House Speaker Mike Johnson has a very different explanation for the growing backlash.

Here’s how the conversation went:

Interviewer: Do you think that, with regards to China, I mean, I’ve had several tech executives and lawmakers, to be clear, say that the information against data centers, that pushback against data centers, is coming from China?

Mike Johnson: Yes.

Interviewer: They believe that. The Democrats are seizing on this, though. They’re making this their messaging. They’ve been very clear they’re going to take this into the midterms. How do you fight that?

Mike Johnson: This is what Democrats do. Every election cycle, they find something to glom onto and say that this is doom and gloom and everyone will die if we don’t win. Don’t buy it. It is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. It’s not a conspiracy theory. I think they’re pushing those ideas.

I think Mike Johnson is a Chinese psyop, actually. And of course, that’s a lie. They think we’re stupid.

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The environmental cost of data centers is real, and it’s steep. Data center electricity consumption already produces about 180 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions globally every year, at a time when the threat from catastrophic climate change is increasing. The International Energy Agency projects those emissions will increase by almost 80 percent by 2030. In other words, we’re going in exactly the opposite direction from where we need to go if we’re ever going to combat catastrophic climate change.

Electricity is only part of the cost. American data centers directly consumed an estimated 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023, much of it simply to keep servers cool. More than a hundred proposed data center moratoriums are now being considered around the country as communities confront the demands these facilities place on electricity, water, and the environment.

Meanwhile, the Trump regime is accelerating construction, opening federal land to development and removing regulatory barriers. There’s one other thing worth mentioning: the size of these things.

The average data center covers roughly 100,000 square feet. That’s about two football fields. But some are as large as one million square feet, which is a number so large it kind of boggles the mind. Do we really think the best use of our federal land is to build a bunch of data centers that don’t provide jobs and destroy our environment?

On September 29, Donald’s own Palm Beach County unanimously approved a one year moratorium on new large scale data centers. After Donald told us that communities rejecting data centers were choosing poverty, unemployment, crime, and squalor, he was asked whether he would want one near his own home.

Here’s another thing about data centers: they produce an enormous amount of noise pollution. Donald’s answer was predictable.

It doesn’t mean I want them right next to my house.

Yeah, no kidding. And none of the rest of us do either.

When it comes to what Americans want, Donald thinks we should be thrilled to have them. Here’s how he described the benefits:

The people are going to benefit directly, whether it’s teachers that get paid a bonus, whether it’s people that live in the community that get paid a dividend. You could call it a dividend because the dividend sounds right. They are going to greatly benefit by what’s happened.

The data centers are incredible. And by the way, I’m very good at real estate. Some of those buildings are absolutely beautiful. They’re big and they’re big, strong, powerful buildings, but they’re beautiful and they add greatly to a community.

It started with a false narrative, mostly by Mike, I would say Democrats.

Yes. A big, strong, powerful, beautiful hunk of cement that covers massive amounts of land that could be used for much better purposes.

These things benefit nobody. They’re destructive, in fact. But they benefit the people who are rich and want to get richer. So that’s just fine with Donald, because he happens to be one of them.

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[Transcript edited for clarity and flow]

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Welcome to this episode of Under the Radar, our weekly look at what the Trump regime is getting away with while Americans are too busy paying attention to the new outrages being committed. This week, we’re looking at what happens when women start dying in the wake of one of the most consequential rollbacks of women’s control over their own bodies in modern American history.

Doctors say an ectopic pregnancy should almost never end in death. Ectopic pregnancies are treatable and with appropriate and timely medical care, overwhelmingly survivable. But in Donald Trump’s America, women are dying. Why? Well, let’s start first with what an ectopic pregnancy actually is.

An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, most commonly in the fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancies can never result in a viable birth. They will never become viable fetuses. Without prompt treatment, ectopic pregnancies can rupture, causing potentially catastrophic internal bleeding. There is literally no reason that an ectopic pregnancy should not be treated, regardless of your views on abortion.

ProPublica analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and found that almost 200 women from 2020 through 2025 died after having ectopic pregnancies. In the previous six years, roughly a hundred women died. The increase occurred nationwide and began during the COVID pandemic. When ProPublica separated states with strict abortion bans from states without them, another pattern emerged. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, states have been free to impose abortion bans that previously would have been unconstitutional. In January 2026, the White House celebrated Donald’s three appointments to the court and said the Supreme Court delivered what it called a “triumphant victory.” That’s right. A victory which has ended in the unnecessary deaths of 200 women simply because they were denied essential and lifesaving healthcare. Again, there were no potential babies in any of these pregnancies.

Today, abortion is banned entirely in 13 states. Another seven banned at 12 weeks or earlier, including Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and South Carolina. States that ban at roughly six weeks, which is when many women have only recently learned they are pregnant or don’t even know they’re pregnant yet. Some of the exceptions are extremely narrow. Nine states with total bans or early gestational limits provide no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Twelve provide no exception for a fatal fetal anomaly. Five don’t even provide a broader health exception beyond circumstances involving the woman’s life.

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Most abortion bans exempt ectopic pregnancies or contain some form of medical emergency exception, but an ectopic pregnancy can become dangerous before doctors can definitively prove that’s what it is. A woman can arrive in an emergency room bleeding and in pain with abnormal pregnancy hormone levels while an ultrasound still cannot show where the pregnancy exists within her body. Before the abortion ban, the patient and her doctor could decide that the danger of waiting for absolute certainty is too great and would end the pregnancy in order to save the woman’s life. Before the abortion ban, the patient and her doctor could decide that the danger to the woman’s life and health were too great to wait, regardless of whether the pregnancy were an ectopic one or not.

Under the current strict bans though, doctors now have another calculation to make. Do they have enough evidence to prove that providing an abortion is legal? In other words, do I have the luxury of finding out if this is an ectopic or a viable pregnancy? And in the interim, will that delay further endanger the woman’s life?

Eleven states with abortion bans impose criminal penalties on doctors who violate them. Doctors can face prison, massive fines, and the loss of their medical licenses. In Alabama, violating the abortion ban can carry a sentence of 10 to 99 years in prison. In Texas, it can mean a felony conviction, loss of medical license and a civil penalty of at least $100,000 for each violation. Every day spent waiting for legal certainty is another day an ectopic pregnancy can continue to grow until the fallopian tube ruptures, causing potentially catastrophic internal bleeding.

Republican Congresswoman Kat Camack of Florida has been a vocal opponent of abortion and now co-chairs the congressional so-called pro-life caucus. But in May 2024, just weeks after Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect, Camack experienced a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. She says hospital staff initially hesitated to give her methotrexate, an abortion medication, because they feared losing their medical licenses or potentially going to jail. But Camack didn’t blame Florida’s abortion law for creating this fear. She blamed the left, saying Democrats and the media had scared doctors and women about what the law actually allowed. Here’s what Camack said about her experience.

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This is what women are experiencing because of the fear mongering around women’s healthcare, and it has to stop. The left absolutely played a role in making sure that doctors and women were scared to seek out the help that they needed. And so I think that this is a wake-up call. My story should really bring forward the national conversation that’s long overdue about the lack of maternal healthcare. And really, I think it’s important that we highlight that doctors aren’t to blame, women aren’t to blame. We need to get the politics out of women’s healthcare.

Yes, Joe Biden is to blame, obviously. Yes, we need to get the politics out of women’s healthcare, says the woman who belongs to a party that is single-handedly responsible for turning women in America into second-class citizens who do not have rights over their own bodies. Yes, let’s please take the politics and the religion out of women’s decisions about their own bodily autonomy. I love that idea. And how’s this? Let’s start with impeaching all six members of the unconstitutional, illegitimate super majority of the Supreme Court for creating a circumstance in which women can be allowed to die because doctors are afraid, because of these draconian anti-abortion laws, to treat their patients for conditions that will not under any circumstances result in the life of a child. Let’s do that, shall we?

In Florida, physicians who willfully perform an abortion outside the law could be convicted of a third degree felony, and the law requires physicians to make and document specific medical judgments to qualify for its exception. Those penalties were enacted by Florida lawmakers, not created by Democrats or the media, because Florida is a very red state, which is totally in the control of Republicans. In Texas, where one of the country’s strictest abortion bans has been in effect for several years, we now have hospital data showing what has happened to women experiencing pregnancy complications.

ProPublica obtained records covering roughly 46,000 ectopic pregnancy encounters in Texas between 2018 and 2024. In 2023 and 2024, 310 more patients experienced substantial blood loss following an ectopic pregnancy than in 2018 and 2019. That’s an increase of about 29%. Texas OB-GYNs have been warning that the state’s abortion ban isn’t just affecting access to abortion, it’s affecting the decisions doctors can make when treating pregnancy complications.

In addition to all of this, the Trump regime is dismantling crucial systems designed to track the consequences to pregnant women of these legislative changes and prevent more women from suffering. On September 16th, Washington Senator Patty Murray questioned Dr. Nicole Safier, Donald’s nominee for US Surgeon General during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. Here’s what Senator Murray and Dr. Safier said.

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Senator Murray: So it’s clear that these Republican abortion bans are killing women. So will you stick to your word? Will you advocate against abortion bans that are harming women?

Safier: Thank you for this question. Obviously, as a woman, it’s very personal to us. I have been in media for a very long time, and it is my understanding that the FDA is currently undergoing a review on the safety of mifepristone as there were some safeguards that were.

Senator Murray: I’m not asking you about that. I’m asking you about ectopic pregnancies. I’ll just tell you the facts. The United States has the highest rate of maternal mortality among wealthy nations, and these bans are killing women, permanently damaging their fertility and traumatizing them. It just seems to me that this was never about protecting women.

Because it isn’t. A lot of the women being killed by these draconian abortion bans are women who actually want to have children. These are women who are only choosing to terminate their pregnancies because either they’re ectopic ones, which have no hope of resulting in the birth of a child, or because the woman’s life is in danger or the fetus itself is not viable.

According to ProPublica, the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health lost most of its roughly 100 employees. The entire team responsible for the pregnancy risk assessment monitoring system, a major source of maternal health data used by researchers in state and local governments, was placed on administrative leave. Because who cares in this regime about maternal health? The CDC also stopped funding a program with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that trained emergency room doctors to handle reproductive health emergencies. Ectopic pregnancies frequently become dangerous before routine prenatal care begins, meaning the emergency room may be the first place these women receive treatment.

How much worse this gets for women remains painfully unclear, especially as the Trump regime dismantles some of the very systems we rely on to find out how women are doing. Donald, on the other hand, has been remarkably clear about his role and how we got here.

Donald: Because for 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated and I did it and I’m proud to have done it.

He couldn’t care less about whether or not abortion is legal. He will just do whatever the religious fanatics want him to do because he only cares about himself.

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Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Trump Trolls Trump. We are now 628 days into what I can only describe as a masterclass in how to run a country directly into the ground, and we're 24 days away from midterm elections that will determine whether we finally get to hold these people accountable or whether we're condemned to two more years of watching them destroy everything. Today we're taking a look back at week 90. You know the drill by now. We're here to mock and ridicule the most inept, corrupt, and genuinely dangerous administration this country has ever known.

Let me start with something that happened on Thursday. The White House hosted what they called a "New golden age of science" summit, and some of the biggest names in technology and science came to Washington. Elon Musk was there. Other accomplished people in their fields were there. It was supposed to be a serious event celebrating American innovation. Then they decided Donald needed a participation award because, well, his uncle was a professor at MIT. I suppose that's the logic we're working with now: your family member's accomplishments are your accomplishments. Good to know we've lowered that bar so dramatically.

But then Donald opened his mouth, and just when everyone thought things couldn’t get any dumber, they absolutely did. This is what he said about his uncle and the great physicist Nikola Tesla:

Interestingly, when you mentioned Tesla, my uncle, Dr. John Trump, was commissioned by the United States government to do a report on Nikola Tesla. They wanted to know was he real or not real? Was he a true genius or not? My uncle, after a fairly short period of time, determined that he was a true and great genius and that he was real in every single way. Otherwise, you’d have to change the name of the car company.

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So my great uncle John, who was quite a brilliant man, I guess it skipped a generation, was tasked with trying to determine if an actual human being who also happened to be one of the most brilliant physicists of his generation was an actual real human being who was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. I'm pretty sure my great uncle John had better things to do.

But we haven't even gotten to the most ridiculous thing Donald said at this science summit, which tells you something about the trajectory of his statements. At the same event, he made an announcement about hurricanes. I want you to sit down and buckle up, because apparently meteorologists have been missing something for years. There is such a thing as a water hurricane.

Donald: They also created the largest ever communication satellite network, Starlink. And in North Carolina, I will tell you personally, because I was involved, we had a hurricane, one of the great water hurricanes of all time delivered more water than at any time that we can remember or in record.

Yes, you read that correctly. That particular hurricane, separate and distinct from all others, was the wettest from the perspective of water because apparently that's never happened before in meteorological history. I'm sure meteorologists everywhere are kicking themselves for not thinking of that distinction. All these years documenting hurricanes, and they never once thought to check whether they had water in them.

If those last remarks left you with any doubt about Donald’s genius, he was kind enough to put those fears to rest with a post on his failing social media platform.

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Yes, “super intelligence,” Oh, I see. When Donald tried to rename artificial intelligence and called it super intelligence a while back, apparently what he meant was that he was referring to himself. And that image proves it. But certainly when it comes to Donald, the intelligence part is sold separately, and even despite all of the billions of dollars he’s grifted from and stolen from the American people over the years, he still can’t afford it.

It’s strange that there’s a new poll showing Donald’s approval rating has now dropped to a low we have not seen since the end of his first term, when he tried to overthrow the government by inciting an insurrection and ordered his followers to storm the Capitol. This is not exactly where you want to be heading into the midterms, but clearly Donald thinks he is operating from a position of strength. Problem for him and the rest of the Republican Party is that nobody else thinks this. They’re all freaking out. The best thing Donald could do for the Republican Party, if he cared about them, would be to disappear until the day after the election. Instead, he’s making this election about himself, which is endangering the chances of any Republicans getting into office.

Next up we have Pete Hegseth, our so-called Secretary of Defense, whom I prefer to call Secretary of Excursions. Was he finally talking about something other than testosterone levels? Was he firing other military officers because they had beards or were too woke? Did he stop treating the press like a hostile foreign power? Did he maybe commit war crimes and get completely over his head in a war he doesn’t know how to win? The answer is that he remains overly concerned in a way that gives me pause, because this insecure little man is obsessed with other men’s testosterone levels, using his own twisted obsessions to get rid of career military officers because they don’t subscribe to his idea of what it means to be a man or a soldier. Obviously in his universe, soldiers can’t be men who believe in equality, women, or anybody who’s not white and Christian. That’s how we’re weakening our military while calling it strength.

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Now let’s talk about Dr. Oz and his newest attempt to prove he understands how regular Americans live. You might remember his infamous crudités incident, when he went grocery shopping to seem relatable and instead demonstrated that he has absolutely no idea what anything costs in this country. Well, he’s back. This week he appeared on Fox News with Laura Ingraham and once again proved to the entire nation that he has no comprehension of the actual economy. He brought a jar of peanut butter as a prop to demonstrate his deep understanding of inflation. This is what he said:

We went grocery shopping, stick a butter bag of peanuts. Butter in America, that’s about a buck for a stick like this. If I charge you ten dollars, or are you shopping? It’s not a buck. It’s four. I just bought this, so it’s close to that. Maybe it’s going bad.

Laura Ingraham had to stop him and tell him the actual price. His solution to high grocery prices is to wait for your food to get rotten. That’s the plan. Forget day old bread. We’re moving straight to week old bread, month old bread, because mold has curative properties. Penicillin, am I right? We’ve reached a point where we need backyard chickens so we can afford eggs, and if we want the food to be more affordable, we just have to wait until it spoils. Perfect.

We’re 24 days away from midterms that will determine the future of this country. Get registered. Check your registration. Vote. Make sure everyone you know votes. Because the only banquet these people are setting is for themselves, and the only intelligence that’s super is the kind required to convince people like Oz and Bessent and the rest of this regime that they belong anywhere near power.

Thank you so much for joining us for this week’s episode of Trump Trolls Trump. Remember always, mockery is our superpower, and we will use it to hold these grifters and thieves to account.

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The Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio was packed to the rafters last night. Or so Donald would have you believe. In reality, what we witnessed was yet another troubling snapshot of the state of the Republican Party: a president so toxic that even his own candidates are willing to manufacture scheduling conflicts to avoid being photographed within shouting distance of him.

Let me back up and explain what’s actually happening here, because the situation in Texas tells us everything we need to know about what Donald has done to the Republican Party and where we stand with 27 days left until the midterms.

Donald is in San Antonio for the third time in a month to campaign for Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General running for Senate against Democrat James Talarico. This level of attention to a single state is unusual, particularly since Donald won Texas by 14 points in 2024. But here’s the problem: Ken Paxton is not winning. Not by a long shot. According to a Sienna College poll cited by Reuters, Talarico leads Paxton 51 percent to 45 percent. Donald’s approval rating among registered voters sits at 32 percent. That’s not just going poorly. That’s a catastrophic failure, and it’s happening in deep red Texas.

Now, Ken Paxton is arguably the worst Republican candidate on an entire slate of terrible ones. He’s been one of the most corrupt state attorneys general in recent memory. But even accounting for his many disqualifications, the fact that he’s losing should tell Donald something: his endorsement is worthless. More than that, it’s actively harmful.

Back in September, the Republican Party did something truly unprecedented. Parties save their national conventions for presidential election years. It’s tradition. It’s how things work. But Donald, desperate for attention and determined to fire up a base that seems increasingly tired of him, insisted on holding the first ever midterm convention in Dallas. The stated goal was to boost turnout and energy, despite the fact that Donald himself isn’t on the ballot.

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At that convention, Paxton delivered what he clearly thought was high praise. He said Donald had delivered more for the country than anyone before, secured victories no other president could achieve, and always stood up for Texas. It was the kind of obsequious flattery that usually makes Donald beam. But here’s where things got interesting: Donald’s endorsement of Paxton was not a love letter. It was damning with faint praise, and it revealed something important about Donald’s state of mind.

Donald spent time criticizing the way Paxton dressed and talked. Let me be clear about the sheer audacity of this. The man who wears ill-fitting clown suits and whose voice sounds like he’s trying to grate cheese was criticizing how another man looked and sounded. But then listen to what he actually said about Paxton’s qualifications:

You may not like the way he looks, but here’s the news. In the history of Texas, he is the single greatest attorney general you’ve ever had and maybe the top attorney general in the whole United States.

Of course Donald thinks Paxton is the greatest attorney general. Paxton is corrupt, and corruption is Donald’s love language. That’s the only metric by which Donald measures people anymore: are they corrupt enough to serve his purposes? Are they willing to bend the rules? That’s the threshold for his approval.

But here’s what happened after that convention: Paxton’s numbers dropped. The same man caught on a hot mic admitted that when they held the convention, it tanked his polling across the board. The person running the convention, the person whose sole purpose was to boost Republican numbers, had the opposite effect. The Republican Party held an unprecedented event centered on Donald, and it made their Senate candidate weaker, not stronger.

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Since then, things have only gotten worse. Paxton started telling donors and lobbyists that his campaign’s real problem is the war in Iran that Donald started. He pointed to gas prices. He pointed to diesel prices exceeding six dollars a gallon. This is what he told donors last month:

It’s the war, it’s gas prices, it’s diesel. When it’s over $6 per gallon for diesel, I mean it’s putting money in a lot of trucks that use diesel who are feeling the pinch. So I’d say that’s probably the biggest problem and that push drives up food prices and everything else. So that’s by far our biggest problem. And I think that’s why we’re having a hard time with numbers.

Now, Paxton’s not wrong about any of this. The war is a disaster. Gas and diesel prices are crushing working people. But what he’s not saying publicly, what he probably won’t say publicly, is that the person responsible for all of this is the president he’s desperately trying to keep close enough to garner support, but far enough away that voters won’t hold him responsible for supporting him.

This is the bind the Republican Party has created for itself.

When Greg Abbott, the incumbent governor of Texas, learned that Donald was planning to hold a rally in San Antonio with Paxton, he made a decision. He would not be there. Instead, his campaign released a carefully worded statement about scheduling conflicts. Let me translate: Greg Abbott, a longtime conservative Republican who has governed Texas as a deeply conservative state, is so concerned about being associated with Donald Trump that he’s willing to manufacture an excuse to avoid appearing with the president of the United States. Abbott is in a dead heat with his Democratic opponent. He needs every advantage. And the one thing that would hurt him most is being photographed at a campaign rally with Donald Trump.

This is not normal. This is not what happened four years ago. This is a president so profoundly unpopular that even Republicans who agree with him on policy are running for cover.

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A Reuters review examined 62 of the most competitive House and Senate races. In 41 of those races, Republican candidates are creating distance from Donald. They’re breaking with him on policy. They’re downplaying their ties to him. They’re avoiding photos. They’re treating him like a liability rather than an asset.

Here’s what this really means: the Republican Party has realized that Donald Trump is toxic. They know it. They’ve known it for months. And now, with the midterms bearing down on them, they’re panicking because they can’t figure out how to win while also being associated with a man whose approval rating is 32 percent.

The irony is exquisite. Donald built a political movement based on cult-like loyalty. He demanded that Republicans bow to him. He destroyed anyone who stood against him. He consolidated power until the entire party bent to his will. And now, when he needs them most, they’re slipping away in the darkness. They’re taking his endorsements and his rallies, and they’re hoping against hope that voters won’t hold them accountable for supporting him.

But voters will. Voters are already doing that. And with 27 days left until these midterms, the Republican Party is learning a hard lesson: absolute loyalty to a deeply unpopular man is not a winning strategy. Eventually, even the people you’ve asked to betray everything they believe in will betray you.

Make sure you’re registered to vote. Check your registration today and keep checking right up until election day. Because this year, your vote might be the only thing standing between democracy and something far worse.

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Welcome to the Art of the Scam.

On September 30th, Donald’s Trump Coin Club announced a new competition, because apparently what the country needs while we’re at war is another way for people to hand over their money to the Trump family.

The event is being marketed as the “most exclusive dinner in the world” and it’s scheduled for November 22nd at Trump National outside Washington DC. The top 185 holders of Donald’s Trump meme coin qualify for the dinner. The top 29 get a VIP reception with Donald himself, and the top four get eighteen carat gold Trump watches. But here’s the thing, and pay attention to this because it’s the whole con in a nutshell: you don’t simply buy a ticket.

Your position is determined by how much Trump meme coin you hold and how long you hold it. The leaderboard closes on November 12th. The more you hold, the longer you hold it, the higher you climb. Which is another way of saying the closer you get to Donald and the more opportunities you have to get influence with him.

Politico reports that investors put nearly two billion dollars into Trump meme coin while competing for spots at Donald’s first meme coin dinner in 2025. Two billion dollars. From retail investors. Who thought they were going to get a return.

And this isn’t the only incentive to keep holding. The Coin Club has also offered top holders access to a Formula One weekend in Singapore and a three-day VIP package surrounding Super Bowl 61 in Los Angeles 2027. But here’s where it gets really interesting, at least in the fine print.

According to the Trump website, the coin has no payment functionality or transactional utility, and it isn’t redeemable for goods, services, or cash. So what you’re buying is essentially the privilege of being scammed by Donald Trump. Which apparently, based on the dollars involved, is a privilege millions of people are willing to pay for.

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So why did Donald and his family get into cryptocurrency in the first place, especially considering that until fairly recently he didn’t even know what it was? In June of 2025, Donnie, his oldest son, offered his version of an explanation on CNBC’s Squawk Box. This is what he said:

I wasn’t involved in the meme coin. I’m more focused on obviously the stablecoin, the Bitcoin mining, some of those things. But the reality is I think a lot of these things in the meme coin, you’re taking responsibility for the meme. The reality of the meme coin is it’s sort of a proof of concept that the crypto world understands exactly what I was talking about earlier, that the markets may not necessarily be fair. The traditional banking system may not be fair to them. So it’s a proof of concept of what I think we can move the needle in crypto. And I think that’s going to be the future of finance. It’s going to be the future of banking almost without question if we can accelerate that process by going all in on it.

Let me translate that for you. By proof of concept, what that useless person means is how many rubes are there in the world and how much can Donald and his useless children grift off of them? That’s the proof of concept that’s being challenged here. Donnie and Eric have become leading promoters of the family’s crypto business because it is making them so much money. Money that they would never have been able to earn on their own and certainly not if Donald weren’t sitting in the Oval Office signing executive orders that benefit their bottom line.

Reuters did some digging and reported in July that while Donnie and Eric were out there publicly encouraging investment in crypto projects, Donald’s financial disclosures showed substantial crypto proceeds flowing into more traditional investments. Stocks and bonds. The safe stuff. While they were telling retail investors to get in on the ground floor of the future of finance, Donald was quietly moving his ill-gotten gains into the kind of investments you make when you know the thing you’re promoting is a scam.

Donald wasn’t the only member of the family to launch a meme coin. Of course not. Melania launched $Melania two days after $Trump. Because why miss an opportunity to exploit people’s misplaced enthusiasm for your husband’s brand?

An April 2026 Senate banking committee later cited reporting estimating that the two coins had cost retail investors approximately four point three billion dollars with roughly two million holders underwater. To which I say I guess that’s exactly what they deserve. Anybody who would invest in these people and expect that they actually care if the company succeeds for investors well, hasn’t been paying attention to anything Donald has done for the past fifty years. For Donald and his useless family members, all they care about is that they come out ahead. Nobody else matters.

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A little more than a year after the meme coin was launched, Reuters analyzed four of the family’s main crypto ventures and calculated that as of the end of April 2026, the Trump family had made an estimated two point three billion dollars. Outside investors had lost approximately two point three billion dollars. And that includes losses on investments they have not yet sold, which means those losses could get worse. With the Trump meme coin alone, Reuters estimated that as of April 30th, buyers had lost more than seven hundred million dollars while the venture had generated approximately six hundred sixteen million dollars for Donald and his family.

One California software engineer profiled by Reuters invested two thousand dollars in the Trump meme coin in January 2025 after seeing Donald promote its launch. By the end of May 2026, her investment was worth less than one hundred twenty dollars.

If you’ve been paying attention to Donald’s so called business career, you would know that all he does for other people is lose them money. While thanks to banks and grifters and people trying to take advantage of him, he has become increasingly rich, especially since getting back into the Oval Office in January of 2025.

Politico reported on October 1st that Trump meme coin had fallen from nearly seventy five dollars per coin in January 2025 to just over two dollars. It isn’t just Trump meme coin. Reuters estimated outside investors had lost approximately six hundred forty million on World Liberty tokens, six hundred seventy five million on shares of Alt Five Sigma, and two hundred million on American Bitcoin. In other words, this does not seem like a very good investment for anybody other than the people selling this stuff.

But here’s what interests me most about all of this, and why this pattern has been going on for so long. Donald always comes out ahead in business ventures that are corrupt and/or failed. This goes way back to the 1970s when Donald and my grandfather Fred were sued by Nixon’s Department of Justice for their racist rental practices. They faced fines as much as one hundred million dollars. But instead of admitting that their rental practices were indeed racist, they hired the infamous attorney Roy Cohn, who countersued the DOJ for one hundred million dollars. The lawsuit settled and of course, Donald and my grandfather didn’t need to do anything to atone. They just had to sue back. And somehow that made it all go away.

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It wasn’t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that Donald’s failures as a businessman and his corruption became obvious when he bankrupted all three of his Atlantic City casinos. Not an easy feat, by the way. But while his investors lost their shirts, he was able to stay afloat and in fact continued to enrich himself. How? Well, the banks believed that the best way to preserve their investment in him was to allow him to continue to live in the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed, the lifestyle that people associated with his brand. So while he had to sell the Eastern Airline Shuttle, the Plaza Hotel, and his mega yacht, he was allowed to keep Mar-a-Lago and his triplex in Trump Tower.

The banks put him on a four hundred fifty thousand dollar a month allowance. So it is very easy to continue to get richer when the deck is entirely stacked in your favor. Nobody is willing to hold you accountable for bankrupting other people, and there is always somebody waiting to pick up the pieces and throw more money at you. Even as bad and failed a businessman as Donald Trump can get rich as long as those are the circumstances in which he’s allowed to operate.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now with the meme coins. Except this time, there are no bankers deciding it’s in their best interest to keep him afloat. This time it’s retail investors, millions of them, making the conscious decision to fund his wealth. This time it’s people who should know better, who have access to information, who can read Reuters reports and SEC filings and testimonies to Congress. This time it’s people making a choice to hand their money over to a man who has demonstrated over and over again that he will never, under any circumstances, care about anything other than enriching himself.

The Trump family doesn’t need anybody’s permission to keep getting richer. We’ve given them permission already. We allowed the system to be rigged in their favor for decades. Now they’re just operating within the system we created, openly and shamelessly. And we’re all picking up the tab.

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When you’re the most unpopular president in American history and you’re hemorrhaging support across every demographic, what do you do? If you’re Donald, you hop on a plane and travel through deep red states where you’ll actually get applause, all while insisting this somehow helps Republicans running in November. It’s the kind of logic only a man in complete psychological and cognitive decline could construct.

Donald spent last night in Grand Island, Nebraska, ostensibly there to support Senator Pete Ricketts in his campaign against independent challenger Dan Osborn. Before he even got to the rally, though, he stopped to do what he does best: speak with reporters outside the White House, contradicting himself and attacking anyone brave enough to point out how badly things are going.

One reporter asked him a straightforward question about something he himself has been saying for years. For years, Donald insisted mail-in voting should be made illegal because it increases voter fraud. Except there’s no evidence it increases voter fraud. But suddenly he’s telling his supporters to vote by mail. A reporter asked him about this contradiction.

Donald: No, vote by mail or vote in person. I’d rather have them vote in person, but they can vote by mail if they want because we seem to have no choice because a lot of people want to vote by mail, but a lot of very good people also want to vote in person. You can do either. What we’re concerned about is there seems to be a lot of, not seems to be, there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail. A lot of cheating all over. I’ll tell you what, start off by taking a look at California. There’s no evidence in California. Take a look at no evidence with millions and millions of ballots. You are fake news.

That is not a coherent response. It’s not an explanation. It’s word salad designed to obscure the fact that he’s been caught in yet another contradiction. Because when a reporter points out facts Donald doesn’t like, particularly his abysmal poll numbers, he has only one response: fake news.

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Another reporter asked him about his tanking numbers with Latino voters. This is what he said:

I’m doing great. No, no. You got my poll. Your fake news. Your CNN, you’re fake news. My poll numbers are great and all you have to do is look at the crowds withdrawing. And every time I leave, that candidate will be losing and by the time I leave, they’re winning. No, CNN poll numbers are fake and your whole outfit is fake and so are you.

That is the response of a toddler who cannot handle being challenged or a man who is so desperately ill, both psychologically and cognitively, that he simply cannot face the truth. Instead of acknowledging that he’s unpopular, that his presence at rallies is actively toxic to Republican candidates, he attacks the messenger and creates an alternate reality where the crowds are bigger and the numbers are better.

But the real darkness didn’t arrive until Donald took the stage.

Donald has said a lot of horrible things throughout his career, but it’s genuinely difficult to imagine any sitting American president telling a crowd of supporters that losing one or two major American cities would be acceptable. Yet that’s exactly what happened.

While talking about gas prices that continue to skyrocket, making food and basic goods increasingly unaffordable for working people and the poor, and while talking about the Iranian war he started and then immediately began losing, Donald turned his focus to two heavily Democratic cities in California: Los Angeles and San Diego.

This is what he told the crowd:

By the way, we’re kicking Iran’s ass. You do know that, right? It’s going to end one way or the other. It’s going to end very soon and your prices are going to come tumbling. All your prices have been tumbling down. In fact, oil is less than it was under Biden, just so you understand. End very quickly and prices are going to come down very sharply. You might say, “Please, please, sir. It’s going down too fast. You watch what’s going to happen in a very short period of time.” And again, remember with the word it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let him take out Los Angeles. Let him take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay and it’s going to be over very soon.

Let me be clear about what I’m looking at here. This is a man suggesting that the deaths of potentially tens of millions of people are an acceptable cost. These are the words of a psychopath, someone so detached from his own humanity and everyone else’s that mass death registers as merely inconvenient.

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And let’s look at the lies embedded in there. The Iranian war is not going well. In fact, we may be seeing a new front opening. Donald lost that war on day one and has spent the last five months declaring victory over and over again. And oil prices? They’re hitting record numbers. Diesel is the highest it’s been in decades. Prices are not going down. They’re not going to go down because the war shows no signs of stopping.

Quick aside: even if prices were somehow declining, I don’t think anyone would be upset about that given how astronomical the cost of living has become. But they’re not declining. They’re climbing. And it’s because Donald doesn’t know what he’s doing. He can’t negotiate himself out of a wet paper bag at this point.

But we need to talk about what he’s really doing here. He’s signaling that he would allow Iran to destroy American cities just to prove some point about how strong he is. And more broadly, he’s setting the stage for martial law before the midterm election. He’s desperate. He knows things are falling apart. He knows it’s his fault. And men like this become dangerous when they’re cornered.

After casually suggesting the annihilation of American cities, Donald pivoted to another remarkable moment. He told the crowd that his illegal tariff policy, which the Supreme Court has already ruled he had no authority to impose under emergency powers, has generated so much money that America is now experiencing record economic success.

And because of all this success, he’s going to give every adult American $5,000.

Donald: Actually, the Trump dividend, as an example, is approximately... Think of that. We’ll call this a dividend. It’s a dividend to the people of our country for putting up with these morons and horrible four years of horror. You put up with four years of stupidity and horror, but the Trump dividend is $1 trillion. And our country is doing so well under Republican leadership that only I can make this promise to you. This is a big promise, but I’ve met all my promises, all my promises. If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate, I am going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000.

He’s not going to do this. And if you believe him, you probably also believe that everything is wonderful right now, which is only true if you’re incredibly wealthy or named Donald.

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He has kept practically none of his promises. The list is so long I literally don’t have time to enumerate it. He promised to end the Ukrainian war on day one. That didn’t happen. He promised the Iranian war would be over in a week. We’re into month five now. On and on it goes. He promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, to lock up Hillary Clinton, to have Mexico pay for the wall. None of it happened.

But that won’t stop him from making new promises he has no intention of keeping.

Before leaving the rally, Donald wanted to make sure the crowd knew that some people are saying he’s the greatest president of all time.

It didn’t get worse than that last administration. In fact, I think the reason I look so good, they’re all saying goat. You know there are a lot of goat hats. I love that goat. I say, “What about Washington and Lincoln?” They say, “You’re better, sir. I mean, you’re better.” They’re believers. Front row Joe’s, we got all the fundraiser. They think I’m better. “You’re better than them, sir. You’re better. Goat, greatest of all time. You know what goat means? Greatest of all time.. So I don’t know if it’s true.

The only people saying this are the voices in his head. Those imaginary supporters who constantly call him “sir” and apparently always have tears streaming down their faces. It’s the delusion of a man so isolated within his own echo chamber that he can’t distinguish between reality and the stories he tells himself.

But then he made a more serious play to the crowd, and he made it more than once. This is what he said:

So in this election, I am going to do this. I’m going to ask you to pretend that I’m running. Do you know there’s a line outside that’s like three, four miles long? Just remember, I’m running, I’m running. Okay. Even if you have to pretend, say Trump, because in a true way I am running. We have to keep it going.

Let me be absolutely clear: Donald cannot constitutionally run for a third term. It would be illegal. It would be unconstitutional. The fact that he’s publicly flirting with this idea, asking his supporters to imagine him on the ballot, is despicable. And for Democrats and everyone else paying attention, this is also your reminder about what’s actually at stake in the midterms.

The Republican Party, as it currently exists, is completely behind Donald. Every single Republican running for office or reelection is a co-conspirator willing to do his bidding regardless. So for all practical purposes, Donald might as well be on the ballot.

But here’s what matters: most people cannot stand Donald Trump. And a vote for any Republican is not just a vote for him. It’s a vote for his continued impunity. It’s a vote for making that horrible man’s life miserable. And right now, with the way things are going, that should be reason enough.

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Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of Under the Radar, where we take a look at what the Trump regime is doing to this country. Because while Donald keeps us distracted, the decisions being made in the background are changing our lives in ways we’re going to be dealing with for a very long time. This week, we’re talking about our planet because without that, quite literally, nothing else matters.

Donald: Yet the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead. These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster. Same group of people. This is the group that came up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax, climate change.

As for the hoaxes he mentioned, I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Russia did indeed interfere with the election in 2016 to get Donald elected, and Russia did indeed invade Ukraine and has been at war with that country ever since. Everything else he said was a lie, of course.

And that’s because he gets paid a lot of money by the people at the forefront of AI and the people and corporations most responsible for catastrophic climate change, oil and gas industry corporations. He doesn’t care about the long term impact of those things, as was made very clear during those remarks to the United Nations he gave on September 22, 2026.

Two weeks before that, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the United States had just experienced its hottest summer in 132 years of record keeping. I don’t want to call Donald’s remarks a speech because they were nothing more than propaganda and disinformation. July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, followed by the hottest August on record. By September 1, drought covered 59 percent of the contiguous United States.

And there’s another enormous new demand on America’s water supply: data centers. They don’t cause droughts, but many consume huge amounts of water for cooling. A 15 megawatt data center can use 80 to 130 million gallons of water a year.

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As Donald pretends that artificial intelligence is now super intelligence, his administration is pushing a massive expansion of the very infrastructure needed to power it. All of this is, of course, worsening the impacts of climate change. And again, it’s called climate change because the climate is changing in ways that are directly related to the ways in which human beings consume fossil fuels and consume energy and fail to find alternatives to the kinds of fuels we currently use.

Not only are these catastrophic decisions worsening the problem, they’re hastening the degree to which climate change is impacting us. And it is deeply offensive to hear that man say that nobody has died from climate change because it isn’t just about extreme heat, which, again, is getting more extreme. Thousands of people die every year from extreme heat events, particularly in places like Europe and Africa. And thousands of people are dying every year because of extreme weather events like worsening hurricanes, for example.

Getting back to the fact that the climate is changing and the globe is warming, from June through August, the average temperature across the contiguous United States was 74.4 degrees. That’s three degrees above the 20th century average. NOAA reported that the extreme conditions contributed to a destructive wildfire season and unhealthy smoke across large parts of the country, while Lake Mead and Lake Powell fell to record low levels.

While Americans were living through the hottest summer on record, much of Donald’s climate agenda was being carried out by the man he chose to run, which is to say destroy, the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin.

At his confirmation hearing on January 16, 2025, Zeldin told senators he had a moral responsibility to be a good steward of our environment for generations to come. Less than two months later, Zeldin went to East Palestine, Ohio, the site of the 2023 toxic train derailment, and announced 31 environmental rollbacks in a single day.

Standing in the fire station of a community that had experienced one of the country’s most notorious environmental disasters, Donald’s EPA administrator described his mission this way:

EPA will be reconsidering many suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars. Our actions include the Biden administration’s deeply flawed Clean Power Plan 2.0, mercury and air toxic standards, Quad OBC, particulate matter 2.5, light, medium, and heavy car and truck rules, knee shapes, and the so called social cost of carbon.

For these people, it is all about saving money, which means finding ways to make them money or help their corporate cronies make more money, not about protecting us or our environment.

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Under Zeldin, the EPA has rescinded the endangerment finding that provided the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles, eliminated federal greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks, moved against greenhouse gas limits for power plants, and tried to terminate the $7 billion Solar for All program, which intended to bring solar power to more than 900,000 low income houses. A federal judge ruled the termination unlawful on September 18. Whether or not that will stop the Trump regime from going ahead remains to be seen.

Zeldin is, of course, a lawyer and former Republican congressman, not a climate or environmental scientist. Before becoming EPA administrator, he had no experience running an environmental regulatory agency at all. During eight years in Congress, the League of Conservation Voters gave him a 14 percent lifetime environmental voting score. Another fox in yet another henhouse.

Zeldin called the Solar for All program a boondoggle. Most recently, on September 14, the EPA announced what it calls the largest power sector deregulatory action in American history, repealing most federal greenhouse gas requirements for fossil fuel power plants and proposing to eliminate the rest.

The administration says the changes will save $310 billion and help provide more reliable and affordable electricity. At the expense of what, though? An Associated Press analysis found that the Trump regime’s broader environmental rollbacks could eventually contribute to roughly 30,000 additional deaths annually, but they don’t care.

And the EPA now claims that even eliminating all United States carbon dioxide emissions would have no meaningful climate impact because greenhouse gas emissions are global. That is the position of the federal agency charged with protecting the environment.

This is what Zeldin said:

It’s a different day under President Trump. The overbearing and often unlawful rules that were sought by prior administrations to destroy reliable base load power made energy prices skyrocket and threatened many communities and states throughout our country. Today we’re cutting the red tape to deliver the largest power sector deregulatory action ever, saving $310 billion for American families.

The EPA’s own analysis of the 2024 power plant carbon standards projected that in 2035 alone, they would prevent approximately 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital emergency room visits, 1,900 new cases of asthma, and 360,000 asthma symptom cases. And that’s just a power plant carbon rule.

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An Associated Press analysis of the broader environmental protections targeted by Donald’s EPA found that those protections were projected to prevent more than 30,000 deaths a year. But while Donald and Zeldin have been dismantling all things climate change, Americans have been living through some kind of hell on Earth.

On July 11, 2025, one week after catastrophic flooding killed at least 135 people in the Texas Hill Country, Donald traveled to Kerrville, Texas. CBS News Texas reporter Marissa Armas asked him what he would say to families who believed earlier warnings could have saved lives.

Marissa Armas: Several families we’ve heard from are obviously upset because they say that those warnings, those alerts didn’t go out in time, and they also say that people could have been saved. What do you say to those families?

This is how Donald responded:

Well, I think everyone did an incredible job under the circumstances. This was, I guess Christie said, a one in 500, one in a thousand years, and I just have admiration for the job that everybody did. There’s just admiration. The only bad person would ask a question like that, to be honest with you. I don’t know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that. I think this has been heroism. This has been incredible, really. The job you’ve all done, it’s easy to sit back and say, Oh, what could have happened here or there? Maybe we could have done something differently. This was a thing that never happened before.

So says the evil person. The reason we ask questions like that is to figure out what went wrong, what we need to change so we can do better next time so 135 people don’t die needlessly.

And obviously, as I said, by continuing to change the mission of the EPA, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, will continue to die, and they don’t need to. But Donald and the Republican Party don’t care if your air and water are poisoned, and they don’t care if our environment worsens, making life increasingly unsustainable on the only planet we have.

But here’s the thing: for them, it’s all about money. It’s all about enriching themselves and their cronies, but they seem not to care about their future or the future of their children and grandchildren either, which is something I have a very difficult time wrapping my head around.

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Donald: Election Day is November 3, so we can defeat the radical left Democrats in a midterm victory that is too big to rig.

Wow. That is a very different message from one that was coming out of the White House over the weekend concerning mail in voting. Donald has been on a campaign against mail in voting, calling it cheating for years now, despite the fact that, of course, he always votes by mail.

Not only did Donald post that message to his failing social media site on Saturday, he then wrote the following day on his failing social media site:

Donald: Republicans must win the 2026 midterm elections and we must use every appropriate tool. Whether you vote early, absentee by mail or in person, we must swamp the radical left Democrats with massive turnout. So important, please get out and vote.

Wait a minute. I thought voting by mail, unless of course you’re Donald, was illegal.

But lest you think that video message was a mistake, Donald has apparently changed his mind about this because he followed that video up with another post telling Republicans that they must win the 2026 midterm elections and use every appropriate tool, whether they vote early, absentee, by mail, or in person. They must swamp the radical left Democrats with massive turnout.

He is literally telling people that they need to pretend he’s on the ballot when they vote, as if that’s going to make people want to vote for Republicans. And this is exactly what he is afraid of. If Democrats win, he will be trapped in a purgatory of impeachment and investigations.

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To underscore Donald’s desperation on Saturday, he posted his latest bribe of $5,000 to all Americans if Republicans win in November. Another promise of a check that will never come. Donald claimed that if Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 midterm elections, he is going to give all adult citizens in the United States $5,000.

I have a question. Is he really going to sign all, I don’t know, 220 million, give or take, $5,000 checks? By the way, that’s a lot of money. Or is he, like his predecessor, going to use an autopen? I personally hope he signs them all himself because then he won’t have time to do any other damage to our country.

On Saturday night in Ohio, Donald repeated the claim. This is what he said:

And our country is doing so well under Republican leadership that only I can make this promise to you. I will make it to you. If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the US Senate, I am going to give all adult citizens in the United States, because we’re making so much money with the tariffs and other things, $5,000 to every adult.

And if you believe that, you are probably also the kind of person who believes that public schools are doing gender reassignment surgery on little children, that oil and gas prices are going down, and that we have won the Iran War 17 times.

Donald held two campaign rallies over the weekend. On Friday night in Mobile, Alabama, he campaigned for Republican candidates, including Tommy Tuberville, who lives in Florida, Barry Moore, and House candidate Rhett Marques. Then on Saturday, he headed to Vandalia, Ohio, to boost Senator Jon Husted and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who apparently doesn’t know how to pick up children.

Different states, different candidates, same exact act. Grievances, boasting, recycled promises. Another round of nonsense aimed at getting Republicans to the polls in November. And, by the way, very little about the actual candidates themselves because Donald doesn’t care about them. He cares about the fact that he needs them to win so they can protect him from the consequences of all of his egregious actions.

Donald told the crowd in Ohio, for example, that they already had $500 checks in the mail. Where did that money come from?

Donald: The Democrats kept money, but we’re giving it back to you. They kept millions and millions of dollars. I just sent out nearly one million refund checks for $500 each, including 70,000 families in Ohio. You’ll be getting them within the next couple of days. We caught them stealing. They stole from you. We’re giving the money back. It’s already in the mail.

They stole from you, says the guy who has now made over $2 billion since getting back into office in January 2025. By the way, he now has much more money than he ever had in his professional life before this.

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That speech in Ohio went on for about an hour and a half, and again, very little of it was about the candidates. He went after one of his new favorite targets, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, singling her out. He suggested that he might withhold federal help from the state if Democrat Amy Acton becomes governor, which she looks to be on track to do. He called for the death penalty for major drug dealers, said his political enemy should be put down once and for all, and he didn’t qualify that by saying he was being metaphorical. He accused Democrats of opposing voter ID because they want to cheat, and once again dusted off the old snake story to portray immigrants as dangerous criminals.

Here is some of what else Donald had to say:

Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win and we’re going to win big. When I see that telefrico in Texas... So he’s been a vegan all his life. He’s campaigned and he’s a vegan, vegan. I didn’t even know what the hell a vegan was. A vegan is vegetables. A vegan is eating a piece of lettuce all day long. And I know more about inflation. I know more about everything than anybody in this room, anybody anywhere in the world. Well, there’s a woman sitting right over there. She’s a housewife, but she’s very good. She’s got a natural instinct for business. She perhaps knows more than I do, but I actually don’t think so. I love Bayer aspirin. I take an aspirin a day. I don’t know if it works, but psychologically I need it. It thins the hell out of your blood, I guess. I don’t know if it works or not, but I’ve been doing it for a long time and here I am making speeches. Had a nice simple life before this. I didn’t have to be here on Saturday night working in front of you people. I could have been home. I could have been in Monte Carlo. I could have been wherever I wanted to be. I didn’t need to be here, but I love you people and I love it.

He seems stable.

I think Donald might be single handedly responsible for the fall in average IQ in this country. He’s definitely responsible for the race to the bottom, for encouraging the lowest common denominator, encouraging Americans to be their worst selves and to be cruel with impunity. That people actually can listen to his rambling, aggrieved, nonsensical lies and delusions and think that he’s okay or that what he’s saying makes any sense is beyond my comprehension.

And then, of course, he said a new version of things he’s said before. He’s often said things like, I know more about war than the generals. I know more about nuclear than anybody. Well, that’s escalated. Donald is now saying that he knows more about everything than anybody on the planet.

So, quick question to anybody who believes that insanity. If anybody else in your life, even somebody you admired, a colleague, a friend, your boss, or a family member, said to you with a straight face and meant it that they know more about everything than everybody, what would you think? You would think it might be time to take away their car keys and get them some help. Or you would think, Oh my God, what an arrogant narcissistic creep.

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Despite Donald trying to put the best spin on everything from gas prices to grocery prices to the Iran War, how are voters feeling about the direction this country is going in? MSNBC spoke to three time Donald voters last week, and one of them was shown Donald promising that he would bring prices down. He explained that those promises were why he voted for him, but that things were totally different now.

This is what he said:

I think that’s the way it is for all politicians. They say something, get elected, and then once they’re in office, they’re totally different.

When asked whether he regretted his vote, this is what he said:

A little bit. I hoped that he would be able to live up to some of his hype, but he’s hyperbolic. That’s all he had been. His middle name ought to be hyperbole. He can’t deliver on any promises. He talks a lot, but I haven’t seen anything come to fruition yet. Of course, I understand they don’t need nukes, but I mean, I need to live and not be able to spend all my money on gas.

When asked how it made him feel to watch all of those campaign promises now, his answer was much simpler:

Like he’s just lying.

Yes, that’s a word.

He’s not hyperbolic. He’s lying to you constantly. And now his lies are completely self serving and designed to make you not believe your own lived experience. Thankfully, that’s breaking through for some people because not all politicians do what Donald is doing. In fact, I don’t know of any politician who does what Donald is doing.

Yes, politicians maybe overstate things. Maybe they don’t make all of their campaign promises come true, but very often there are external reasons for that despite their best intentions. Almost everything that is going wrong in this country right now is the direct result of actions Donald has taken, supported by the entirety of the Republican Party.

And I think this is by design. It’s all designed to make the rest of us poor, tired, stressed out, and sick so that we are not going to be able to get our acts together to combat the horrible policies that the Republicans keep wanting to enact.

So the best revenge is this: don’t get tired, don’t get stressed, just vote. We are less than 30 days out from the most important election in our lifetime. Check your voter registration and keep checking it until your vote is cast.

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