Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.

Dems want damning surveillance report

A pair of Democratic senators are accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of hiding a report that “details serious abuses of Americans’ rights under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., are trying to pry loose a report they say the administration is legally required to make public after a FISA court opinion detailed abuses of the program in March.

Since retaking office, Trump has expanded the federal government’s arsenal of creepy surveillance tools en route to building what appears to be an unprecedented spy machine that can track Americans. It’s in that context that Democrats — with some GOP help — tanked a vote in June that would have extended the controversial FISA powers that give the government broad latitude to sweep up data, including information belonging to Americans.

In a letter to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche, the two Senate Democrats said the damning FISA report from on alleged surveillance abuses should have been released already — and demanded that it be released now so lawmakers can consider whether to extend FISA powers next year.

They wrote:

The administration has now had over seven months to declassify and release this opinion. It is time to stop violating the law and finally release this opinion. And if this administration won’t follow this simple statutory directive, it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.

Read more at Gizmodo.

AI bots’ banking break-ins

Artificial intelligence bots are increasingly gaining unauthorized access to people’s bank accounts, according to new reporting from Axios. The report homes in on concerns among bank officials about security in the age of AI.

Read more at Axios.

Massive Meta judgment

A judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after the company lost a lawsuit alleging that the company broke New Mexico’s consumer protection laws and jeopardized its users after the Cambridge Analytica scandal nearly a decade ago. Meta has vowed to appeal the ruling.

Read more at MS NOW.

Republican outcry over Colom ad

After Mississippi’s Republican attorney general issued legal threats last week, the state’s Democratic Senate nominee, Scott Colom, deleted an ad using AI tools to mock his Republican opponent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. I wrote about how it seems like Republicans are fretting over this race in a deep-red state.

Read more at MS NOW.

Pro-ICE activist reportedly faces deportation

Samuel Sey, a popular right-wing influencer known for supporting Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown, reportedly has been detained by immigration officials and is now facing deportation after allegedly overstaying a temporary visa.

Read more at The Roys Report.

What AI guidelines?

The good news is the Pentagon apparently has some guidelines around the development of AI tools to avoid the risk of escalating wars or harming civilians and troops. The bad news? Defense officials aren’t always adhering to these rules, according to a congressional report.

Read more at NPR.

Anthropic bots get alarming access

Anthropic says its AI tool accessed Georgia voting data typically only available to people who pay for it. The company and Georgia’s secretary of state said no individual voter records were accessed, but the intrusion marks yet another disturbing security breach involving AI. A new report explains why “the company’s statements about what its bot accessed raise more questions.”

Read more at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Alpha School shortcomings

An investigation from The New York Times suggests that Alpha School, the network of AI-fueled private schools that have been backed by the Trump administration and vow to offer a superior learning experience, is failing to live up to its promises.

Read more at The New York Times.

MAGA influencer meddling fails

Several MAGA influencers have recently been in Brazil and Serbia, hoping to sway elections in both countries — but the pro-authoritarian candidates they supported flamed out over the weekend. Now, especially when it comes to Brazil, Trump and a bunch of extremely online conservatives are pushing lies about the election being rigged, as my colleague Brandy Zydrozny explained.

Read more at MS NOW.

The post Senate Democrats warn that the Trump administration is hiding a damning surveillance report appeared first on MS NOW.

U.S. President Donald Trump is considering lifting sanctions against Russia's government investment fund, the New York Times reported Oct. 27, citing an unnamed U.S. official.

If reporters can only maintain their access to the White House by staying in Donald Trump’s good graces, they will not be free to do their most vital work, and the public will be deprived of information that is essential to its democratic role as a check on corruption and despotism.

That’s why I’m suing him.

If Trump has his way, the press pool will eventually consist solely of enablers and courtiers, of whom there are already too many. They will not raise the pressing issues that the American people need Trump to address. We will not see how he reacts to tough questions — whether he answers them at all, gets angry, lies, attacks, changes the subject or gets flustered.

The founders put freedom of the press in the First Amendment to guarantee an independent and uncensored press that could fully inform the public and hold the government accountable.

And the threat of being targeted in the future is already distorting the reporting of news organizations. According to an ABC News lawyer, the network’s news division has been tempering its election coverage ahead of the midterms, for fear of retribution.

Trump most recently punished MS NOW, CNN and Politico by banning them from the White House. They sued, and a federal judge tentatively restored their access. But Trump is appealing. He is making a preposterous argument citing national security. The White House has continued to exclude CNN and Politico from pool duty on Air Force One. The Independent’s correspondent, Andrew Feinberg, was kicked off Air Force One on Thursday after he somehow infuriated the president the day before. And as Trump said last month, “There may be others to follow.”

These actions amount to an unconstitutional attack on the public’s right to trustworthy and undistorted reporting about the president and his policies.

For this reason, I am one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed on Monday by the champions of the free press at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. My fellow plaintiffs include Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch; Yale history professor Beverly Gage; and Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of Lawfare.

We all rely on newsgathering and reporting from members of the White House press corps. Our right to that information would be abridged if the only reporters left there were either toadies or too scared of losing access to ask tough questions and speak the truth.

Indeed, because of the chilling effect created by Trump’s threats, my rights (and yours) to trusted information from independent news organizations are already being violated.

The only way to truly protect our right to independent reporting is for the courts to deliver a ruling that prevents Trump or any other president from ever doing this again, to anyone.

And that is no small thing. The founders put freedom of the press in the First Amendment to guarantee an independent and uncensored press that could fully inform the public and hold the government accountable.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

When the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration’s efforts to block newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote, “In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors … Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

For over a century, every president has recognized the obligation to provide spaces nearby where the press can engage in First Amendment-protected newsgathering.

Both the practical and the constitutional necessities were obvious. Particularly in times of crisis, the pool’s presence as independent witnesses in the White House and on Air Force One — attesting to the president’s health and safety, for instance — is essential so the American people don’t just have to take the government’s word for it.

The lawsuit from the currently targeted news organizations is a good first step toward restoring the status quo. But the only way to truly protect our right to independent reporting is for the courts to deliver a ruling that prevents Trump or any other president from ever doing this again, to anyone.

As a press critic who believes that the most essential job of a political reporter is to hold the powerful accountable, I have criticized the White House press corps over the years — but only in practice, not in principle. Its members are the only outsiders whom Trump is required to admit into his bubble of sycophancy. They alone can ask him difficult questions, get him to respond to facts he would rather not acknowledge, and confront him with his lies. They alone can demand answers. And they do that on behalf of the American people, who have no such opportunity.

Trump’s new de facto policy — which he himself described as a “ban on the free press” — cannot be allowed to stand.

The post The president admits he’s censoring the free press. That’s why I’m suing him. appeared first on MS NOW.

As is true of the first two criminal cases the Trump Justice Department brought against James Comey in Virginia and North Carolina, the third set of charges, made public this week in Washington, D.C., presents multiple legal issues.

A potentially fatal threshold issue is that federal prosecutors may have blown a key deadline — indeed, the key deadline, one that could kill the latest case against the former FBI director before it even gets going.

The Washington charges, stemming from allegations of unlawfully sharing sensitive government information with a journalist, have a 10-year statute of limitations. That means prosecutors must bring them within a decade of the alleged offense.

The DOJ apparently brought the case just in time to make the 10-year window for alleged criminal conduct from 2016. But regardless of the allegations’ validity on their merits (which a jury could decide down the road, if it gets that far), a more pressing issue is the type of legal instrument that prosecutors used to bring these charges. They used an information, which doesn’t require grand jury approval, as opposed to an indictment, which does. The reason that’s a possibly fatal problem is that the law for these charges says they must be brought within 10 years by “indictment,” without mentioning “information” as an option.

Comey’s lawyers made that point in a pending motion to dismiss. They noted that Congress has referenced both informations and indictments in other laws; therefore, the defense argued, lawmakers know how to specify the difference but chose to require an indictment here. The defense asked the judge to “enforce the text that Congress wrote and dismiss the information as time barred.”

Opposing the dismissal motion, the DOJ argued that it’s both premature and that the difference between informations and indictments isn’t as big a deal here as Comey claims. Prosecutors cited the general five-year statute of limitations law, which references both indictments and informations; from that, they argued that the 10-year law for Comey’s charges, which mentions indictments but not informations, is really only about extending the limitations period, not about the form those charges must take.

The bottom line is that if Comey is correct, then the DOJ’s failure to obtain an indictment within the 10-year period is not a mere technical foot fault — it’s the end of the case before it begins. This latest case, therefore, starts with a crucial court battle over whether it’s a case at all.

It’s a battle that the DOJ could have avoided by securing an indictment. We don’t know why it didn’t do so. We do know, generally, that it has had trouble securing approval of charges from citizens called to grand jury service in President Donald Trump’s second term in some of the administration’s most political cases in the nation’s capital.

At any rate, this felony case won’t proceed toward trial without prosecutors first securing an indictment. That grand jury process is required unless a defendant waives their right to it, which we have no reason to expect here. So even if prosecutors win this threshold battle and succeed in stopping the clock with their placeholder information, they still need to clear that grand jury hurdle.

If they do so, then that would only put prosecutors in a position to face the more standard pretrial motions to dismiss before the case can make it to trial. I say “more” standard because a notable feature of litigation in Trump’s second term has been defendants raising claims that they have been vindictively or selectively prosecuted by this revenge-fueled administration.

As with grand jury refusals to approve indictments, even potentially successful motions along those lines had been rare. Yet they have been raised in a series of high-profile cases in Trump’s second term, including in Comey’s other cases. If this latest one proceeds, then we should expect him to make such a motion here, too. We should also expect it to be taken seriously in this third attempt to prosecute the Trump target with criminal charges that were lodged on the eve of a 10-year deadline — charges which, Comey’s lawyers observed in their pending motion to dismiss, previous prosecutors refused to bring.

And that’s before even getting to a potential trial, where the government would have the burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. In the factual background section of the DOJ’s pending opposition motion, it said the government “uncovered evidence” that, when Comey was FBI director during Trump’s first term (before Trump fired him in 2017), he told his staff to share information with a New York Times reporter to “correct misinformation” from another outlet’s reporting about email surveillance.

Like all defendants, Comey is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

His Virginia charges, which related to his congressional testimony in 2020, were dismissed pretrial last year, because a judge found the Trump-backed lawyer overseeing the case, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed. The DOJ is appealing.

Meanwhile, the judge in North Carolina is considering Comey’s pretrial motions to dismiss that case, which stems from his posting a photo of seashells on Instagram that the government argued amounted to a criminal threat against the president.

The post How the Trump DOJ can lose the new Comey case before it even starts appeared first on MS NOW.

According to Donald Trump’s version of events, ahead of his Saturday night campaign rally in Georgia, his own team encouraged him not to celebrate higher gas prices. The president ignored the good advice.

In fact, Trump spent quite a bit of time at the event bragging that oil and gas companies are “making a fortune” as a result of higher gas prices, so consumers struggling to pay their bills should be glad they’re paying more at the pump.

As for members of his team who encouraged him not to make such comments, the president added, “I said, ‘I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it.’”

In the same set of remarks, however, Trump also added a related thought that didn’t generate nearly as much attention: “You know, you’re still paying lower than [you were under] Biden.”

When all else fails, this is the card Republicans play when the public discussion turns to gas prices. It’s a talking point rooted in the idea that consumers might be frustrated now, but they should remember that conditions were even worse when Trump’s Democratic predecessor was in the White House.

Except that’s also not true. Reuters reported:

Americans have paid more for their gasoline and diesel at the pump on average during President Donald Trump’s second term than they did under his Democratic predecessor, Joe ​Biden, according to the AAA. […]

The price of a gallon of regular gasoline has averaged $3.472 since Trump took office almost two years ago, edging out the $3.471-per-gallon average for Biden’s term, according to data from the AAA.

In general, gas prices were unremarkable across much of Biden’s term, but after Trump’s friends in Moscow decided to launch an unprovoked war in neighboring Ukraine — a move Trump described at the time as “genius” — prices spiked. When Republicans talk about Biden-era gas prices, they’re hoping Americans forget why, exactly, costs climbed during the Democrat’s term.

Nevertheless, when we look at the broader average, which includes the Russia-imposed spike, the AAA data shows consumers were paying roughly $3.47 a gallon during the Democrat’s presidency — which is less, not more, than the average during Trump’s second term.

What’s more, a Bloomberg News report added that Americans have never paid as much as they’re paying now so late in the year, as opposed to the summer driving season.

Is it any wonder why Trump is peddling unpersuasive nonsense? On one of the key issues of the day, the Republican is confronting a reality that is proving unspinnable.

The post New data shows why Trump should stop talking about Biden-era gas prices appeared first on MS NOW.

As the White House’s anti-fraud task force struggled with its principal task, Team Trump last week turned to a new idea: crowdsourcing. Under the Republican administration’s latest gambit, Americans who uncover and report cases of fraud will be eligible for cash rewards.

Donald Trump specifically said at an Oval Office announcement that “people will make millions of dollars by turning others in.”

That’s an extraordinarily unlikely scenario, although the fact that the president was turning to regular people to help uncover evidence seems effectively like an admission that the task force has fallen short of success. Oddly enough, a week later, Trump, frustrated that his own team hasn’t found evidence of systemic voter fraud either, rolled out another crowdsourcing plan.

On Monday afternoon, he published an item to his social media platform that read in its entirety, “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

During a brief Q&A with reporters, the president stopped whining about Barack Obama’s Cheesecake Factory joke long enough to reiterate his support for the idea.

Trump: "I'm also going to be issuing a $1 million bonus or reward or whatever you want to call it for anybody that reports voter fraud, leading to the arrest and conviction of somebody. We're giving that person $1 million."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-26T21:03:50.135Z

“I’m also going to be issuing $1 million bonus or reward, or whatever you want to call it, for anybody that reports voter fraud, leading to the arrest and conviction of somebody,” Trump said. “We’re giving that person $1 million.”

Some skepticism is in order. It’s not at all clear whether this new initiative exists in reality. The New York Times reported, “The White House did not immediately respond to questions about where the money would come from for the ostensible rewards or how Americans are supposed to report fraud accusations.”

I guess it’s possible that Trump might agree to cut checks with his own money (he made at least $2.2 billion last year, so he could afford it), but the president isn’t known for easily parting with cash. That means he’d have to get the money from somewhere else, and to date, Congress hasn’t appropriated any such funds. He would also have to create some kind of mechanism for reporting allegations of fraud, which does not currently exist.

The project struck me as interesting, though, because of the motivation behind the apparent scheme. As a factual matter, voter fraud in American elections is exceedingly rare; and the U.S. system is both strong and secure, even if Trump and other Republican conspiracy theorists have spent many years desperately trying to convince the public there is a national scourge tearing at the very fabric of our democracy.

The offer of $1 million payouts is notable, in other words, because it’s the latest in a series of moves intended to undermine public confidence in elections by pointing to an imaginary crisis.

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an election law expert, told The Washington Sun that the White House’s latest move is “part of a larger project on the part of Donald Trump to generate distrust of the election system by touting election fraud as some kind of problem.”

If recent history is any guide, these efforts are likely to get worse in the coming days and weeks.

The post As his team struggles to find voter fraud evidence, Trump turns to crowdsourcing (again) appeared first on MS NOW.

Last week, on the heels of Trump administration officials going after Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Barack Obama issued a statement condemning the obvious and politicized abuse, explaining, “It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say.”

As part of the same statement, the former Democratic president added, “And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.”

The reference to the former FBI director made a lot of sense in light of the Republican administration’s crusade against James Comey, although Obama could not have known what would happen eight days later. MS NOW reported:

Former FBI Director James Comey is facing new federal criminal charges in Washington, D.C., accusing him of unlawfully transmitting sensitive national defense information and conspiring to disclose it to a reporter, according to court documents unsealed Monday.

Prosecutors filed the two-count criminal information under seal on Oct. 5, alleging Comey improperly disclosed national defense information while serving as FBI director in 2016. The charges include unlawfully transmitting national defense information to an unauthorized person and conspiracy to commit that offense.

According to the filing, Comey was responsible for some kind of sensitive leak on Oct. 5, 2016. The crime carries a 10-year statute of limitations, which made it all the more notable that Trump’s Justice Department brought the new charges on the last possible day.

In a statement, the former FBI director said the developments “would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to.” Comey added, “Nothing’s changed with me. I’m still innocent, and I’m still not afraid of these people, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary.”

It might seem like ancient history, but nearly a decade ago, Trump saw Comey as a political ally. In fact, in January 2017, just two days into his first term, the president appeared to literally blow a kiss at the then-FBI director at a White House event, thanks in part to Comey’s role in undermining Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy.

The affection did not endure. Days later, Trump told Comey he expected “loyalty,” and after Comey did his job instead, the president fired him in the hopes of derailing the FBI’s investigation into the Russia scandal.

When Comey, a lifelong Republican, went public with his concerns and criticisms about Trump, the president came to see the ousted FBI chief as one of his chief enemies, and in April 2018, he started demanding that Comey be prosecuted for crimes that Trump struggled to identify.

It’s taken several years, but the president is seeing the results he’s long sought.

When Trump’s DOJ first charged Comey last year, it was a devastating moment for American law enforcement. MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian reported that within the DOJ, many insiders believed it was “among the worst abuses” in the history of the institution. Describing the circumstances as “shocking,” Dilanian added, “It’s hard to overstate how a big a moment this is.”

Indeed, among the most striking things about the Comey case was that it had barely a pretense of propriety. A failing, desperate and unpopular president wanted a critic to be charged, without regard for merit; he publicly demanded the indictment; and he found officials who were willing to feed his appetite for revenge. It was a tragic lesson that Americans now live in a country where the president’s political opponents are prosecuted at his command.

Alan Rozenshtein, a former DOJ official who now teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, told The New York Times, “What we are seeing is the almost wholesale collapse of the Justice Department as an organization based on the rule of law.”

The case ultimately collapsed, but not before a federal judge blasted prosecutors for what he described as an “indict first, investigate later” attitude. Around the same time, a bipartisan group of former federal prosecutors and judges wrote in a court filing that the case was an “assault” on the justice system.

In theory, Trump’s DOJ should have been chastened by the condemnations and by the case’s failure. In practice, the shamelessly weaponized department decided to give it another try, charging Comey again in April, alleging he used Instagram to call for violence against Trump by way of a purported seashell-related code.

Legal experts were reportedly “shell-shocked” over the preposterous nature of the case, and with good reason: No fair-minded observer could defend or take seriously such spurious charges.

Nevertheless, there’s now another case.

Time will tell what, if anything, comes of the cases, though there’s no reason to assume that a conviction is Trump’s intended end point. On the contrary, in the broader context, the new indictment checks a different set of boxes for the Republican president.

First, Trump appears eager to make it clear he can orchestrate federal prosecutions based entirely on his whim and petty desires, without regard for merit or evidence. There is, for all intents and purposes, a White House enemies list, and the president seems eager to intimidate and instill fear in those whose names appear on it.

Second, Trump is sending an unsubtle signal to other federal prosecutors who might be inclined to prioritize the rule of law over the White House’s wishes. Indeed, when it comes to the pursuit of the former FBI director, the prosecutors who chose not to bring charges against Comey were replaced with those who would follow political instructions. As a second set of charges moves forward, the message to other prosecutors couldn’t be clearer: Play along with the revenge campaign or face unemployment.

And third, the Comey prosecution allows the president to demonstrate he can force his perceived enemies to endure legal, personal and financial hardships as a direct consequence of their defiance of him, even if the indictments are a joke and the defendants are ultimately acquitted.

Trying to convict the former FBI director is largely irrelevant. The corruption is the point.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post The DOJ’s cases against Comey will likely fail. For Trump, a conviction may not be the point. appeared first on MS NOW.

Remember Katie Zacharia? She served as Donald Trump’s White House press secretary for about five days before her embarrassing tenure ended abruptly nearly two weeks ago.

Zacharia has said very little in public since losing a job the president never should have given her, but this week, she spoke to the California Post about her extraordinarily unusual experience, pointing to, among other things, her lack of preparation. From the article:

Defending her rocky press room performance, Zacharia claimed she was given “only a few hours of actual briefing material” on the morning of her first press conference. She said former press secretaries, including Kayleigh McEnany, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Ari Fleischer, and Sean Spicer, reached out to express sympathy over what she called an inadequate “runway” to prepare.

In some ways, this helps capture what made the Zacharia story so notable in the first place.

To be sure, it was (and is) notable that the president chose an unqualified and conspiratorial commentator to serve as his chief spokesperson. But just below the surface, the way in which Trump hired and fired Zacharia reflects a spectacularly dysfunctional White House that struggles to complete basic tasks.

The president and his team, without any meaningful vetting process, chose a conspiracy theorist to be the public face of the White House, three weeks before nationwide elections, and then threw her into a difficult role without any meaningful preparation. Failure was both predictable and unavoidable.

But a competent West Wing would have known that in advance and taken steps to avoid a humiliating disaster.

“As the midterm elections draw near, the machine has begun to sputter,” The Atlantic’s Jon Chait noted after Zacharia’s ouster. “In the span of days, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he would livestream a public execution, only for Trump to overrule him, [and] the administration fired Kimberly Guilfoyle, its ambassador to Greece, for engaging in corruption so overt, it embarrassed even the most corrupt administration in history. … In the midst of this multicar pileup, Zacharia briefly stepped forward as the administration’s stammering face.”

The fact that her failure came as a surprise to Team Trump speaks volumes about its competence — or lack thereof.

As for the former press secretary’s future, Trump told reporters two weeks ago that he expects her to continue to serve in his administration, “maybe a more pleasant form,” though that may not be altogether true.

“Zacharia teased that new career announcements are imminent, vowing to remain an outspoken Trump ally from outside the executive branch,” the California Post’s article added.

The post Katie Zacharia blames brief White House tenure on lack of prep appeared first on MS NOW.

As America celebrates its 250th anniversary of declared independence this year, citizens turn their thoughts to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and … Benedict Arnold? 

When Barack Obama returned to the campaign trail in Michigan over the weekend, the former Democratic president took aim at his Republican successor on a variety of fronts, but he seemed especially interested in mocking Donald Trump’s misplaced priorities.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV,” Obama said. “The guy’s building a ballroom that’s bigger than the White House. He’s paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn.

“And there’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere.”

“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory” — Obama

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-24T19:12:37.597Z

The comments drew hearty laughter, probably because Obama was right: Trump really is fixated more on remodeling, renovations and interior design than on his weighty responsibilities. That preference has gone poorly, because Trump’s presidency is failing and because the Republican’s gaudy taste has turned the Oval Office into a showcase for gold curios.

If the incumbent president were capable of thinking strategically, he would have taken this opportunity to push a constructive message that reflected the concerns of the American mainstream and proved Obama wrong. Trump instead spent Monday doing the opposite.

Before departing for Mississippi, for example, the Republican held a seven-minute Q&A with members of the White House press corps, and he spent more than half of it whining in response to Obama’s ridicule.

Soon after, the president headlined a rally in support of struggling GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, where he spent another six minutes whining in response to the joke.

The pushback was itself foolish. To hear Trump tell it, Obama is “a stupid person” and “a lousy president” who “doesn’t like” companies like the Cheesecake Factory. The Republican also said he had spent “peanuts” on White House renovations, which seemed like an odd way to characterize roughly $1 billion in investments.

Just as notably, Trump wants Americans to know he’s worked tirelessly with the world’s “finest artisans” to overhaul the presidential mansion and make it “beautiful.” (He didn’t comment on Obama’s reference to Saddam Hussein, about whom Trump has said positive things in the recent past.)

So as Obama poked fun at his successor’s fixation on vanity projects and his failure to focus on what really matters, triggered Trump thought it would be good to fixate on his renovations in the most vainglorious way — and to prove Obama right.

The post Triggered by Cheesecake Factory joke, Trump inadvertently helps prove Obama’s point appeared first on MS NOW.

As the 2026 midterms approach, concerns are mounting over whether President Trump will attempt to overturn results through legal challenges, seizure of voting machines, or other controversial measures.

A ceasefire around Russian-occupied Oleshky in Kherson Oblast took effect at 03:00 on 27 October Kyiv time, and both sides were complying with the agreements, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said. Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that its forces had stopped firing on the Kherson axis at 04:00 Moscow time, at the same moment.

Russia has kept Oleshky cut off for months. In June, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine documented worsening shortages of food, medicine, and medical care there and in neighboring Hola Prystan. As of 8 October, Lubinets’ office still saw no practical breakthrough toward an organized evacuation, with 358 residents verified as needing help to leave. The ceasefire is the first step that has to hold before aid can go in and residents can leave, an operation Marc Beckman, the first lady’s chief adviser, expects to take five to seven days.

By 09:00 on 27 October, Russian forces were still observing the ceasefire, according to Pavlo Drohal, spokesperson for Ukraine’s 30th Marine Corps. Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Presidential Office, announced that the mission had begun and that Lubinets had gone to the site to coordinate it.

Ceasefire planned for occupied Oleshky as residents face starvation and blocked escape routes, White House announces

Ceasefire brought forward by two days

The White House announced on 23 October that First Lady Melania Trump had secured a localized ceasefire, set to begin on 29 October. The same evening, Russia’s chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov announced a ceasefire on the Kherson axis from 27 October, with engineering reconnaissance and a secured route for a humanitarian convoy. Ukraine’s General Staff followed, introducing a ceasefire in a designated area from the same hour.

Beckman told Ukrinform on 26 October that Russia had moved the ceasefire two days earlier and extended it beyond Oleshky into Kherson Oblast. Lubinets said on 23 October that the mission should effectively begin on 29 October, after demining, adding that the date was not a matter of principle for either side.

A day after the announcement, Lubinets and his Russian counterpart Yana Lantratova, who lead the two negotiating groups, confirmed the timing in an online meeting, he said. According to Lubinets, the agreement covers demining the road to Oleshky, delivering food, water, medicine, and hospital equipment, and safe movement for civilians.

Newsmax to document the operation

Meanwhile, Melania Trump said she had secured an “impartial American media organization” to accompany the Russian and Ukrainian teams. Beckman named it as Newsmax. He said he had worked directly with the channel’s owner, and that its journalists would record testimony as what he called neutral American observers.

Residents could leave for Ukraine or Russia, or stay, Beckman said. He added that Russia had assured Kyiv and Washington it would respect their choice of destination. Both governments asked him not to disclose what guarantees Russia gave or how violations would be handled, he said. He expects the operation to take five to seven days after 29 October, with an extension possible if both sides agree.

Diplomat doubts the truce will move peace talks

At the same time, Kostiantyn Yelisieiev, Ukraine’s ambassador to the EU in 2010–2015, told Radio NV the truce became possible only through the personal involvement of Donald and Melania Trump. The US president, he said, sees it as a way to show Americans he is bringing peace closer. He said he expects Russia to attempt provocations aimed at pushing residents toward the Russian side.

Yelisieiev said he does not share the optimism of those who think Oleshky could push the wider peace process forward. He compared it to the Black Sea grain corridor, a one-off arrangement that no longer works. He warned of a “diplomatic smokescreen”: Russia imitates negotiations while it keeps fighting, hoping Ukraine and its partners weaken over time.

A town under blockade

Oleshky lies on the left bank of the Dnipro, about 4 km from Kherson, and has been occupied since February 2022, Radio Svoboda reported. The White House says it had about 24,000 residents before the war and estimates 1,700 to 2,000 remain, mostly elderly, including about 50 children. Russian troops have also seized food dropped by Ukrainian drones, a local official said.

At a Trump rally in Michigan on Sunday, David Beamer, the father of a passenger who died on the hijacked United Flight 93 on 9/11, made a remarkable criticism of Democratic senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

“Mike Rogers is an American,” Beamer said of El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, as President Donald Trump looked on. “Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. You know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.”

Dismissing a birth certificate as legitimate evidence of nationality underscores the egregious bigotry of the GOP’s racist playbook against El-Sayed. And it illuminates an evolution in the right’s tactics toward a postbirtherism white nationalism.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, Trump played a key role in popularizing racist “birtherism” conspiracy theories that sought to undermine Obama’s legitimacy as president by claiming he was not born in the U.S. One right-wing activist titled a book promoting those theories “Where’s The Birth Certificate?” Those narratives prompted Obama to release a long-form birth certificate to the public in 2011 — after having released a standard one in 2008 in response to earlier sets of rumors.

The right wants to become an arbiter of who gets to be an American, using its own political and racial metrics.

That wasn’t enough for Trump. In 2012 he tweeted, “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” He and many on the right questioned the authenticity of the certificate several other times. Years later, however, he claimed he was the one who had “finished” the manufactured controversy.

Trump’s questioning of Obama’s Americanness was, undoubtedly, animated by rank bigotry. But ostensibly that disinformation campaign had a solution — an authentic certificate. Implicitly, it acknowledged the constitutional rights conferred by being born in the U.S.

Now things have gotten far worse: Having a birth certificate is not enough. Being a citizen is not enough. Having the backing of the Constitution is not enough. Instead, the right wants to become an arbiter of who gets to be an American, using its own political and racial metrics.

“[El-Sayed] demonstrates with his view of what our world should look like that he’s not an American, he’s anti-American,” Beamer said at the rally. How did he determine this? Beamer claimed, falsely, that El-Sayed’s beliefs “align” with the Islamist organization the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a fabricated claim. It takes El-Sayed’s Arab ancestry as a pretext for claiming he has covert extremist beliefs. For right-wingers, the “proof” is El-Sayed’s background.

“He has blood that’s red,” Beamer said. “However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.”

Given that white in the U.S. flag symbolizes, according to the U.S. government, “purity and innocence” and blue symbolizes “vigilance, perseverance, and justice,” it’s not hard to see how Beamer’s remarks code as a comment on El-Sayed being innately too swarthy and too dangerous for Michigan. Thus, his potential election becomes an “invasion.” In an echo of the fascistic language of the 20th century, the right’s case against the people they want to Other is rendered in terms of protection of the body.

Beamer’s virulent rhetoric is in keeping with that of the party. At the same rally, Trump smeared El-Sayed as a “jihadist” — a lie he has repeatedly uttered. Rogers’ first attack ad against El-Sayed attempted to portray left-wing politicians of color as violent anarchists.

The shameful comments of Trump, Rogers, Beamer and others are not an outlier limited to one Senate race, but a summary of the right’s trajectory. This is all of a piece with the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back birthright citizenship and effectively permit immigration based on race. Vice President JD Vance has promoted the idea that ethnic heritage, not shared values, make one an American. This project, under the guise of protecting America from a so-called invasion, is a bid to create nothing less than a white ethnostate.

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CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Everything is bigger in Texas, and with a week to go until Election Day here, that holds true both for the amount of money being spent in the campaigns and for the political capital at stake for President Donald Trump.

The president made his third visit in the past month to the Lone Star State Tuesday with his endorsement power on the line. In the state’s primary, he helped oust incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn in favor of embattled state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

More than $1 billion in overall ad spending by both parties has already poured into Texas, and the critical race between Paxton and Democrat James Talarico, where well over half of that money has gone, is on track to become the most expensive Senate contest in U.S. history.

According to the latest polling average from MS NOW/FiftyPlusOne, Talarico has a slight edge over Paxton, 49.2% to 46.5%.

Trump’s trip back to Texas to stump for Paxton and other Republicans is another stop on his red state tour to turn out his base in the campaign’s closing days, with control of the House and Senate at stake.

On Tuesday he sought to energize those supporters, particularly young men, with two former college football stars beloved in the state, Johnny Manziel and Colt McCoy, along with two-time Super Bowl champion Danny Amendola, who joined him in Texas, according to a White House official. Axios was first to report the former football players joining Trump on the trail.

Trump made two stops, rallying first in the southern coast city of Corpus Christi followed by a visit to Lubbock in deeply conservative West Texas. Corpus Christi is located in Texas’ 34th Congressional District, which is one of a handful across the country that voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election but elected a Democrat to the House.

At his first stop in Corpus Christi, Trump spent a considerable amount of time touting the acquisition of one million barrels of oil from Venezuela, calling it the “greatest oil victory in history.” He also doubled down on his proposal to make Venezuela the 51st state, saying that instead of voting for a president, “we’ll have an election for a governor” in Venezuela.

In a rare cameo, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the stage briefly mid-speech as Trump repeated that he was going to “drop him off in Cuba.” The crowd chanted Rubio’s name as he was introduced by the president.

Paxton also spoke at the podium during pre-program and briefly joined Trump onstage during the president’s remarks.

A GOP strategist knowledgeable about Republicans’ thinking in the midterms who was given anonymity to talk freely about party strategy told MS NOW that the district is “one of the best offensive opportunities for us in the entire country in the House.” The competitiveness is evident in ad spending here: Republicans’ efforts to flip Democratic incumbent Vincent Gonzalez’ seat and Democrats’ attempts to defend it make it the most expensive House race in the state, according to data from ad tracking firm AdImpact.

As Trump travels from the southern coast to Lubbock, he’ll have company: Talarico is set to hold a community rally in town, just a few miles from where the president will be at about the same time.

“Lubbock is a chance for us to juice turnout in a red area,” the GOP strategist said, adding that bringing out “hardcore Trump supporters” from some of the reddest parts of red states to boost Republican votes in statewide elections has been a “theme” of many of Trump’s other rallies in the final stretch of the midterms.

“Texas is a state where the more people turn out, Dems don’t have the path to victory,” the strategist explained.

But as Trump urges his supporters to pretend he’s on the ballot in November, it remains to be seen whether his support will translate to a win for Paxton.

Paxton does have a clear financial advantage. It’s not from his own campaign fundraising, however, but instead from outside super PAC money that has poured in. Almost $560 million has been spent on advertisements in the Senate race, according to AdImpact, with Republicans’ spending making up nearly $400 million of that total.

One of Paxton’s biggest backers is SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Last month he dropped an eye-popping $158 million into a Senate GOP leadership-linked super PAC, to be directed to another group focused on boosting Paxton, making Musk the single biggest known GOP donor at the federal level this election cycle. That was after he gave $10 million to support Paxton in August.

Nour Longi contributed to this story.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been giving troops a day off to vote, but those votes may not help Republicans as much as Hegseth would like.

The secretary is urging service members to cast their ballots as he ramps up efforts to turn out the vote ahead of November’s midterm elections.

But historically low voter turnout among active-duty military members and frustrations over the war with Iran may put a damper on Hegseth’s hopes for how the military will vote —- if its members vote at all.

Earlier this month, Hegseth ordered a one-day “stand down” to all commanders to give their troops a day to vote in the U.S. elections.

“Every warrior deserves an opportunity to cast his or her ballot and be confident that it will be counted. Keep our nation the land of the free and the home of the brave,” Hegseth said in a video on X. “Get registered and vote.”

Hegseth did not direct troops how to vote as he urged them to cast their ballots.

Military voters have largely been characterized as a constituency highly favorable to Republicans, but that isn’t necessarily the case, given how few service members actually cast ballots.

“Would he [Hegseth] do this if he thought that it was just about soldiers getting to vote and if he didn’t have some idea of which way they might go?” asked Jason Dempsey, an Army veteran and professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University who specializes in military demographics and civil-military relations. “He’s just not somebody who respects the normal processes and the independence of the military,” Dempsey said.

Support for Republicans might be lower than Hegseth hopes when low turnout combined with slim margins are taken into consideration.

“The key with the military is always, they come from the American public and so they bring the predispositions and proclivities towards politics that their fellow citizens do,” said Dempsey.

Dempsey says that demographics like race and gender are much more likely to influence a servicemember’s vote more than the fact that they are in the military, but he notes that senior officers have historically leaned toward voting Republican. Almost 20% of the military is Black, much higher than the American general population, and Dempsey notes that these servicemembers have been more likely to vote Democratic in the past.

This November’s elections come as service members are also raising a growing list of concerns about Hegseth’s and Trump’s leadership and directives, including the rise of Christian nationalism within the Pentagon, Trump’s use of the National Guard in cities across the U.S. and possibly illegal orders in military campaigns.

And as Trump and Hegseth continue to send troops to the Middle East on record-breaking deployments, the administration’s policies could become a motivating force for troops who might otherwise sit out the election.

“They want to follow leaders, and they want to do what they’re told, and they’re strong believers in defense and will go on deployments, but they just don’t believe that the leaders know what they’re doing,” said retired Navy Capt. Donald Inbody, author of “The Soldier Vote,” a history of how American service members gained the right to vote while serving away from home.

In March, the organization Blue Star Families reached out to about 200 military families and found that 81% reported elevated stress from the Middle East conflict, with 43% reporting “a great deal of stress,” driven by safety concerns, deployment changes and fear of escalation.

Hegseth’s stand-down day is another way to address a persistent challenge: getting troops to vote.

The nation’s 1.3 million active-duty military members have historically turned out to vote in lower numbers than civilians. Forty-three percent of active-duty service members cast a ballot in the 2024 general election, according to a report published by the Federal Voting Assistance Program. That’s compared with the 65% of all U.S. citizens who voted in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Plus, military service compounds a youth turnout problem.

Of about 1.32 million active-component members, 36.8% were under age 25, 60.3% were under 30, and 76.7% were under 35, according to Defense Health Agency data. Troops start from the baseline of young voters, a demographic with already low turnout.

The logistical challenges of casting an absentee ballot then push participation below what age alone would predict.

Experts say the timing of Hegseth’s stand-down directive leaves little time for service members to obtain, fill out and return their ballot in time for it to be counted.

Inbody said that service members needed to plan in advance to have their vote counted. Service members who didn’t request a ballot until the October stand-down face a tight round-trip by mail.

The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009, requires states to send requested ballots for military and overseas voters by Sept. 19 — which was 45 days before the Nov. 3 election, Inbody said.

“You basically have to plan really far in advance to not only receive the ballot, but then also mail it in time to get it back,” Inbody said.

“The absentee ballot will probably get to them within a week. Then they need to fill the ballot out and get it back, and assume that maybe it takes two weeks for it to get back. So there, you’ve eaten up three weeks of your 45 days.”

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