The Great Sleeping Giant of the US Has Awakened...

  “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” said the newly elected Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. “It’s top versus bottom.”

 

...looked at what's happening...and roared a thunderous "NO!" 

 

 Robert Reich / Guardian UK

05 November 26

 

The great sleeping giant of the US has awakened, taken a hard look at what’s become of the nation, and roared a thunderous “NO!”

What occurred on Tuesday was not – as some are saying – the inevitable midterm swing of the pendulum against the party in power. Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988. The last time Kansas elected a Democratic senator was 1932.

Nor was it just the economy. Americans are unhappy with high prices, to be sure, but inflation isn’t out of control. The country is not in a depression or recession. Unemployment remains quite low.

Nor, finally, was it all due to Donald Trump. Despite Trump’s repeated efforts to get voters to “pretend” he was on the ballot, he was not. Most Republican candidates barely mentioned him and many Democratic candidates stressed local or statewide issues rather than fixate on him.

Something much larger is responsible for what occurred: anti-establishment populism. It’s burst forth against the mammoth corporations that have scored record profits while most Americans have had to pay more. Against the mega donors and super Pacs that have flooded US politics with more campaign money – legalized bribes – than ever before.

And against the big tech billionaires who have become the most powerful force in the US economy and society – as well as Trump’s and the Republican party’s most visible backers.

The irony is that anti-establishment anger propelled Trump into the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024. Many Americans had found his politically incorrect rants and “America first” nativism to reflect their own anger at being disrespected and left behind. “I am your warrior,” he told supporters when he announced his candidacy for the 2024 election.

But during his second term, Trump has morphed into the very establishment he had railed against. He gave tax cuts and subsidies to tech billionaires. He’s promoted their AI, pushed their datacenters, put Elon Musk in charge of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), advocated their crypto, and went to war in the Middle East – not only causing gas prices to soar but making big oil billions (or, as Trump bafflingly boasts, “we’re making an absolute fortune in our country”) and enriching big tech weapons makers and investors, including his family.

Many who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024 have now abandoned him because of this blatant corruption, crony capitalism and eagerness to be on the gilded side of the US’s new Gilded Age. According to CNBC’s late October poll, corruption was the top issue on voters’ minds.

Meanwhile, anti-establishment populism has taken firm hold in the Democratic party. “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” said the newly elected Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. “It’s top versus bottom.”

Sherrod Brown regained his Senate seat from Ohio largely due to voter anger at datacenters and the big tech billionaires behind them.

Abdul El-Sayed never tired on the campaign trail of reminding Michigan voters that his opponent, Mike Rogers, was backed by big corporations and mega donors.

Even Kansas’s victorious Adam Hamilton – who during his run for the Senate adamantly rejected the leftist label his opponent wanted to impose on him – campaigned on making datacenters pay for their own energy, banning lawmakers from trading stocks, expanding Medicare drug-price negotiations, and cracking down on price-gouging.

Hamilton also rejected money from corporate Pacs, as did most Democratic candidates for the Senate.

The real question in my mind is whether, come January when they control Congress, Democrats will take advantage of the new populism to enact measures most Americans need, such as Medicare for All, and reforms most Americans want, such as tougher anti-monopoly laws and limits on campaign contributions (even if this requires a constitutional amendment).

Trump is likely to veto any such initiatives, of course, but at least they’ll lay down markers for the 2028 presidential election – which, judging from what we’ve seen in the midterms, is likely to be a populist doozie.

 Abdul El-Sayed never tired on the campaign trail of reminding Michigan voters that his opponent, Mike Rogers, was backed by big corporations and mega donors. 

"WE THE PEOPLE": AMERICA IS BACK!

Blue Wave Crashes on Trump

     Senator-elect James Talarico at an Election Night event in Austin, Texas. (photo:  Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

 

Absolute landslide returns Dems to control of both houses

 

CANADA: Will you be our neighbor again?

 

Benjamin Wallace-Wells / The New Yorker

 04 November 26

The Republican Party has only the President and his policies to blame for its historic losses in the 2026 midterms.

For nine months, on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, there has been a makeshift memorial for Alex Pretti, the registered nurse who was shot and killed by federal agents while trying to shield a fellow-protester during last winter’s deportation campaign in the city. On Tuesday, after Minnesotans cast their ballots in the state’s Senate race, many of them pressed their “I voted” stickers onto a lamppost at the memorial, as if completing a picture. The gestures suggested something about this year’s midterm elections which, as the evening wore on, turned out to be true: that it was a mundane event that held unusual moral stakes.

During the two years since Donald Trump won reëlection, he has pushed the country toward a brink. Trump won only a narrow Presidential majority in 2024, and his party held a majority in each chamber of Congress by just a few seats. Even so, the President faced little institutional resistance as he pushed the federal government-eroding DOGE program, the senseless and costly tariffs, the authoritarian power of the crackdown on migrants, the feckless Iran war. He could pursue these goals because he had convinced most of his party, and many members of the public, that his victory over Kamala Harris meant that half of the country would irrevocably be on his side.

The results of the midterm votes are still rolling in. But the rejection of the President is undeniable and uncomplicated, and it reached deep into what had long been understood as conservative territory. His party has lost its Senate race in Ohio—and looks likely to lose in Michigan, where the post-industrial economy had long supplied the symbolic heart of Trumpism. It has lost in Texas, where Democrats had not won a statewide race in more than a hundred contests, stretching back to 1994, and in South Carolina. It has lost in Iowa and in Kansas, which has not seated a Democratic senator since the Great Depression. There are counties in southwestern Kansas where Trump won two years ago by about thirty-five points—Finney County, Seward County, Ford County—that, as the tallies accumulated in the state’s U.S. Senate race, were voting narrowly for the Democrat. For a decade, the country had become used to a fixed map—blue in the cities, deep red in the outlying areas. Now there is some instability around the edges.

One specific issue, or an especially weak Republican candidate, might make sense as an explanation in particular races. But the truth is that Trump’s past two years have offered voters a menu of reasons to turn away from him. In South Texas, it might have been the cruelty of the immigration raids; in Kansas, the effect of the Iran war on diesel and fertilizer prices; in South Carolina, an especially poorly chosen Republican candidate. Over the course of the long Trump decade, many liberals had come to assume that conservatives were so devoted to the culture war that they were politically impervious to events. But this time, in such places, the news made it through. All of it mattered.

Somewhat suddenly, almost nothing in U.S. politics seems certain. The Democratic Party has lately been understood as an aging, defensive entity, with a nursing-home veneer. But this year’s campaigns have elevated a group of younger and newer Democrats (Jon Ossoff, in Georgia; James Talarico, in Texas; Abdul El-Sayed, in Michigan) who have found it quite natural to denounce the oligarchic and authoritarian elements of the status quo, and to separate themselves from some elements of the Party’s doctrine. The South, the most deeply conservative region in the country for nearly all of its history, suddenly has a purple hue. Is J. D. Vance still the presumptive next Presidential nominee? Will the Republican Party still pliably fall into line behind the man who lost in Texas?

And though the Democrats have made astonishing breakthroughs, their near-term future is a little cloudy, too. The intraparty fight, between its insurgent, youthful left and the legacy party, a contest intense enough that at times it seemed to crowd out the whole rest of American politics, is still unresolved—both sides can claim vindication, and can point to new champions emerging from the midterms. The Party itself remains generally unpopular. Perhaps most important, with the liberal grassroots awaiting a Presidential primary to come, lower-wattage figures (Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer) are now in charge. For a political formation that might now have a claim on a majority, the Democrats remain curiously faceless.

Even so, one instance of clarity came around 11 P.M., as Fox News flashed the graphic predicting that the Democrats would win control of the House of Representatives: we are no longer in the shadow of 2024. In culture and in politics, conservatives had insisted that Trump’s victory in that election was the defining one, and that it reflected a culminating turn against “wokeness,” against internationalism, against modern ideas about gender or race—a more atavistic America was being unleashed. Trump called into Fox News just after midnight, sounding a little whimsical and discursive. “It’s just a point in time,” the President said. “There was a mood in the air, I guess.”

In a similar way, perhaps, the 2024 election, and the atmosphere it ushered in, now looks a bit more like an aberration, and the idea that it represented a historical pivot seems more like the wishful thinking of a few people who stood to benefit from it. The experience of the past two years has mattered—tallied, among other places, in the “I voted” stickers that climbed up the memorial in Minneapolis. Elon Musk spent nearly two hundred million dollars to keep Texas red, and the Republicans blew it. Of course, it looks like a slightly different Texas, this morning. It looks like a slightly different country. 

Supporters cheer as they watch early election results before Democratic Senate candidate Texas state Rep. James Talarico arrives to speak at an election night event in Austin, Texas, on Nov. 3.

Eric Gay/AP Photo/Eric Gay

We Face Our Nation’s Fourth Great Crisis

 

 "This election is about we the people — and about the idea of America."

 

Ken Burns / The New York Times

03 November 26

 

There have been three great crises in American history: the Civil War, perhaps the defining event in our history after the Revolution itself, the Great Depression and World War II. These events tested our republic and our resolve in fundamental ways, but the center always held — elections took place, there was a peaceful transfer of power and the judiciary was still independent. Our core democratic institutions remained fundamentally strong, respected by the public and our leaders alike. The guardrails of our democracy held and were even strengthened as we emerged from each.

As we go to the polls today in this most consequential of midterm elections, we face our country’s fourth great crisis. Because of misinformation, which the current administration encourages, age-old fears and conspiracies have created a sense of us versus them that is fundamentally at odds with a healthy democratic society. Elections are in doubt, the highest court seems compromised, history has been distorted, books have been banned, and dictators have been coddled while our closest allies have been ridiculed and dismissed. People are rightly concerned whether our institutions are at a breaking point.

I’ve spent the better part of the past two years crisscrossing the country, discussing the release of our PBS series on the American Revolution. No matter where I went or to whom I spoke, people asked me the same questions: What did I learn about our complicated and fragile republic over the nearly 10 years it took to make the film? Can a country as divided as ours survive? What might our founders think of us today?

I think the founders would be hugely disappointed that so many members of the legislative branch have ceded so much power to the executive branch, which has filled that vacuum with corruption and assaults on the rule of law, even undermining the fundamental right to vote. John Adams, who insisted that a republic could not function without virtuous leaders, would be appalled at the prevailing vulgarity and incompetence.

From the start, the creation of the United States was unlikely. For most of human history, people had lived under authoritarian rule, but in the 13 former British colonies clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, people (white men) would create something new: citizens.

“All experience has shown,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Maintaining a democracy would be difficult, an active exercise that would simultaneously try to honor our individual freedoms (what each of us wants) and our collective freedoms (what we need).

George Washington’s great achievement was not just winning a war against overwhelming odds, but persuading 13 new states with different economies, religious beliefs and competing interests that they were now part of something new in which old animosities would yield to an individual, as well as collective, sense of union. There would be an “us,” with no “them.”

During the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787, delegates understood that in the many compromises they would strike, they also had to engineer defenses against the rise of a tyrant. 

In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson worried that a president who lost an election might “pretend false votes” and “hold possession of the reins of government.” Alexander Hamilton was also concerned that an “unprincipled” man would “mount the hobby horse of popularity” and “throw things in confusion.” “In a government like ours,” he wrote, no one is “above the law.”

Today, nearly six years after an angry mob stormed the Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 election, election denial is still part of the current administration’s playbook. Only four of the 13 Republican candidates in highly competitive Senate races have said that they would accept the outcome of the upcoming elections unconditionally.

It hasn’t always been that way. During Watergate, as damning evidence accumulated, members of President Richard Nixon’s own party concluded that their obligation to the Constitution was greater than their obligation to him or the G.O.P. In August 1974, Republican congressional leaders went to the White House and told Nixon that his support in Congress had collapsed. He announced his resignation the next day.

Citizens today should remember that our democracy relies on an ongoing conversation between them and the past. At Gettysburg, only a few months after the largest battle ever fought on American soil, Abraham Lincoln asked the living to dedicate themselves to “a new birth of freedom,” recognizing that every generation must renew and expand on the promises first made in Philadelphia. Dwight Eisenhower, who knew better than most the terrible cost of war, reminded us in his farewell address that only “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” could preserve liberty and security.

I’m optimistic that the American people recognize that our democratic institutions and sense of decency can bring us together.

We have come back from crises before. We were more divided than we are today during the Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction and Vietnam. For 250 years, our country has prevailed in fits and starts, forging achievements, however imperfect, related to race and equality in American life.

But given our divisions, as we vote we must each ask ourselves: What kind of leadership will see us through the current crisis? Why do we continue to support leaders who are invested in deepening our divides, who tap into conspiracy theories to frighten the public, deny facts and, to quote Alexander Hamilton, “throw things into confusion,” so that they “may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind’”?

Most midterm elections are seen as referendums on the policies of the president. This one is no different. But there’s something more fundamental at stake here, beyond policy differences. This election is about the people — who are empowered to check our chief executive — and the candidates running for Congress, who either have sworn an oath to the Constitution or hope to do so. Whether they are prepared to honor their oath should matter enormously to everyone who values the idea of us — the idea of America.

Republicans have their cowardice to blame for their midterm mess

AP

The next few installments of Congressional Cowards—a weekly

series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol

Hill—will focus on the midterm elections as Republicans grow 

desperate and despondent about their odds of maintaining their 

congressional majorities.

Caving to Trump at every turn paved the way for their electoral demise.

 

by Emily Singer

Daily Kos Staff

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

 

The midterm elections are just two days away, and by all measures Republicans are set to have a terrible night—with their control of the House gone and their Senate majority hanging on by a thread.

After all is said and done, there will unquestionably be a lot of finger-pointing as Republicans fight over who’s to blame for the mess they are soon going to find themselves in.

But ultimately what they should be doing is looking in the mirror, as it’s their own cowardice and refusal to stand up to President Donald Trump that’s to blame for why they will find themselves out of power when the new Congress is sworn in.

Indeed, this installment of Congressional Cowards—the final one before the midterms take place—is a look down memory lane at how Republicans caved to Trump at every turn over the past two years, paving the way for their own electoral demise.

Let’s roll the tape, shall we?

Republicans cheered Trump’s cruel mass deportation agenda, giving his Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons a de facto blank check and carte blanche to round up and deport anyone who merely looked Hispanic. They continued defending the conduct of Trump’s immigration goons even after they began killing Americans who dared to stand up to agents’ behavior.

Protesters gather near a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility Scarborough, Maine, one day after the shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, on July 14.AP

Indeed, Trump’s deportation actions were so draconian and evil that it turned immigration from an issue that benefitted Republicans at the ballot box to a massive liability. It caused Hispanic voters to turn away from the GOP and erased any gains the party made with the critical voting bloc in 2024—a shift that is imperiling Republicans in states like Texas and Florida, where Republicans could lose races they have no business losing based on 2024’s results.

Meanwhile, for virtually all of 2025, Republicans ran cover for Trump on the Epstein files, blocking efforts to force the release of the government’s documents on the now-deceased pedophile because Trump didn’t want them to see the light of day (for good reason).

Ultimately, Republicans did vote to require Trump to release the files—but only when one of their own lawmakers successfully maneuvered a bill to the floor that forced their hand.

Their work to shield Trump from having to release the Epstein files has been a major line of attack from Democrats both on the campaign trail and in attack ads. And voters are bringing it up as they heckle Trump at his rallies over the last few weeks in otherwise deep red areas—showing that too has been a drag on their midterm chances. 

Cartoon by David HorseyDavid Horsey/Tribune Content Agency

Meanwhile, Republicans abandoned their GOP’s long-held trade positions to allow Trump to levy idiotic tariffs on our own allies and largest trading partners. Those tariffs hit the rural communities that backed Trump by large margins especially hard, as countries like China refused to buy crops from American producers. 

What’s more, the tariffs raised input costs on everything from fertilizer to farming equipment, hurting farmers so badly that farm bankruptcies are spiking under the Trump-induced economic pressure.

It’s why Republicans are now struggling in agricultural heavy states like Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina—states the GOP has no business losing but very well could on Tuesday night.

But of all the GOP’s actions, it was their rolling over to allow Trump to wage war in Iran without congressional approval that was the nail in their proverbial coffin this election cycle.

Republicans let Trump launch attacks on Iran without justifying his plan to Congress, letting Trump entangle the U.S. in yet another foreign conflict despite a pledge not to start new forever wars. And then, once it became clear the war was damaging the global economy as well as the United States’ standing in the world, they still refused to stop him. 

Eight months later, Americans are not any safer than they were before the war began, and instead are now paying a steep economic price for Trump’s bloodlust and ineptitude. 

Gas prices are displayed at a Chevron gas station, in downtown Los Angeles, on March 31, AP

Only a handful of Republicans ever broke with their party to vote for a war powers resolution—and by then it was too late. They were already on record defending the war, which has spiked gas prices and the cost of living here at home, so angering the GOP base that many of their voters may just stay home or even defect and vote for Democrats.

Ultimately, when this midterm election cycle started, all Republicans had to do was keep the economy humming along and I’d probably be sitting here writing today that the GOP was likely going to keep its House majority and that the Senate was never in reach for team blue.

Instead, Republicans are now staring down a cresting tsunami that will sweep them out of power and cause Trump and the GOP headaches for the next two years. 

Trump livid at Obama's description of White House decor as 'Saddam Hussein-inspired Cheesecake Factory'

 

Cheesecake Factory line infuriates our president of gluttony and gilded excess

ByDavid Edwards 

Raw Story 

10/30/2026

President Donald Trump lashed out at former President Barack Obama for overlooking the “filth” in the White House after Obama mocked Trump’s renovations as a Cheesecake Factory opened by a dictator.

Trump made the remarks Monday when a reporter traveling with him asked whether he had a further response to Obama’s Cheesecake Factory joke.

Also Read: Trump risks decimating GOP in must-win state by rewarding loyalty

“No,” Trump said. He then spent more than three minutes defending the renovations, a reply far longer than the joke that prompted it.

Obama made the joke Saturday at a campaign rally in Ohio, his first appearance for this fall’s midterm elections, NBC News reported.

Want more breaking political news? Click for the latest headlines at Raw Story.

He was mocking Trump’s ballroom construction and the gold accents added throughout the White House, the network reported.

During his speech, Obama criticized President Trump for spending time renovating the White House and adding gold finishes to the Oval Office and anywhere else he could..

He also criticized the decision to build a 400 million dollar ballroom to host foreign leaders and major events while most Americans struggle to put food on the table and go to the doctor..

“Does anybody really think this guy in the White House right now is spending all that time thinking about these issues?” Obama said. “I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV.”

Obama then dropped the line:

“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama continued, invoking the late Iraqi dictator.

“I’ve taken care of the White House,” Trump told reporters. “I fixed it with the finest artisans in the world.  We reskinned it. The exterior plaster was broken, cracked, and the painting was terrible.”

“He doesn’t notice dirt and filth that had been cleaned, where the walls hadn’t been cleaned for years,” Trump said of Obama. “He doesn’t notice areas that haven’t been painted.”

“In my opinion, he’s not smart at all because the way he ran the country, only a stupid person would run the country like that,” Trump said.

“And for you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” Trump said into the camera as he wrapped up.

Conservatives had spent the weekend defending the restaurant chain, with commentators accusing Obama of sneering at working-class Americans who eat there, Daily Kos reported.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who should be focusing on making life more affordable for average Americans, instead took up Trump's defense Monday, two days after Obama’s joke, in a video posted on X.

The video shows him walking out of a Cheesecake Factory to a Fox Business reporter and camera waiting outside.

“An interesting lunch choice today,” the reporter told Bessent before asking what he ordered. “Oh, I have what I always had,” Bessent replied, naming “the French dip cheeseburger.”

“This is the man who built the museum and it looks like Darth Vader’s tomb,” Bessent said when asked about Obama’s joke, an apparent reference to the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

“I had a great meal, always have a great meal, and I would tell the Martha’s Vineyard set to give it a try,” Bessent added, referring to the Massachusetts island where the Obamas own a home.

Then Obama went in for the kill, pointing out that while Trump and his billionaire surrogates were mobilizing a “whole-of-government response” to defend a restaurant chain from a joke, they were ignoring the grinding economic reality facing ordinary families. 

Mad as hell and sweating like he's there already.
 

Good news: We found the voter fraud!

  Scott Presler speaks as Eric Trump and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump listen at a rally for Donald Trump on Oct. 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.  AP

With the GOP, every accusation is always, always a mirror, and voter fraud is no exception. Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

 

by Lisa Needham

Daily Kos Staff

 

The GOP loves nothing more than to bang the drum about how Democrats are going to let all the undocumented people double vote and also maybe hack the voting machines to only return results for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in every race across the country, even though she’s in Congress. And still, somehow, it’s GOP operatives and true believers who keep actively, consciously committing voter fraud.

In the latest, it’s Scott Presler, a top GOP grassroots organizer. Presler owns a house in Pennsylvania, and The Bulwark learned he loves his friends so much that he lets them vote there.

No, not live there. Vote there.

In 2024, Presler voted from his home in Beaver County, and GOP operatives from across the country did too.

Scott Presler arrives before President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in State College, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 26, 2024.AP

Hmmm. Do we think the consultant who voted in Pennsylvania for the 2024 presidential election but voted in Florida in 2020 and 2025 really lived in Pennsylvania for the 2024 presidential cycle?

Presler is, of course, one of the top dogs in the GOP who screams about voter fraud, furious that a shelter for unhoused people serves as the voting address for unhoused people.

With the GOP, every accusation is always, always a mirror, and voter fraud is no exception. Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

Last year at this time, we learned that Mr. Pizzagate, alt-right political activist Jack Posobiec, had voted in Pennsylvania since 2004—which is quite the feat, since he lives in Maryland. He used mommy and daddy’s address to vote in the swing state in 2018, 2022, and 2024

And during this primary season, we learned that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman who was Trump’s pick for Minnesota governor, was registered to vote in Texas, not Minnesota, even as his doomed nonsense vanity campaign trundled along.

Back in 2022, we learned that somehow former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows avoided getting charged for his voter fraud, where he was registered simultaneously in North Carolina and two other states,

And former Trump adviser Steve Bannon suffered no consequences for being registered to vote at a vacant home slated for demolition in Florida in 2016. 

Bannon wasn’t the only acolyte from Trump 1.0 to be registered in two states—hello there, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and second daughter Tiffany Trump. Now, it isn’t actually illegal to be briefly registered in two states as long as you don’t try to vote in two states. However, we guarantee if these weren’t Republican darlings but a non-white random Democrat, the Department of Justice would have charged them 20 times already.

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Related | Trump’s pick for Minnesota governor is registered to vote in Texas

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Then there was North Carolina political operative McCrae Dowless, who basically harvested absentee ballots in both 2016 and 2018 and tried to obstruct the investigation into it.

And before there was Donald Trump, there was Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White—yes, the guy who oversaw elections in Indiana. He ran on a platform of “election integrity” because of course he did. He was convicted of six felonies back in 2012. Dude lied about where he lived while campaigning because he wanted to still draw the salary from his town council even though he no longer lived there.

And that’s not even getting into the repeated voter fraud committed by regular GOP voters.

Meet Donald Kirk Hartle. Donald found out a ballot was cast in his dead wife’s name, which he called “sickening,” part of what GOP operative Matt Schlapp touted as one of “hundreds of dead people” who voted in 2020.

Sickening indeed—except it was Donald Hartle himself who cast his dead wife’s ballot. 

Or how about not one, not two, but three residents of The Villages, the Trumpy senior citizen stronghold in Florida, who admitted to voting twice in the 2020 election?

The GOP doesn’t care about voter fraud. They care about suppressing the votes of people who don’t vote for Republicans. But if you’re a Republican and down to commit a little light voter fraud? They’re ready to ride.

The big stall is going to catch a lot of us napping.

White House Directly Intervened to Shut Down Epstein Files Probe

     An exhibit on the Epstein files. (photo: Edna Leshowitz/Getty)

Donald Trump’s team helped craft the memo announcing there would be no further investigation.

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling / The New Republic

25 october 26  

The White House was involved in the FBI’s Epstein files cover-up all along.

The FBI’s July 2025 Epstein files memo immediately blew up in the bureau’s face. Its declaration that there was no “client list,” no punishable co-conspirators, and no grounds for further investigation both infuriated the president’s MAGA voter base and started the long domino effect that would eventually oust ex–Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump administration messages obtained by Raw Story revealed Friday that Taylor Budowich, then the White House deputy chief of staff, had his fingers in the FBI’s drafting process prior to the memo’s public release.

“Have something I can edit?” Budowich emailed FBI Director Kash Patel two weeks before the memo was released. The email’s subject line read: “Re: Draft memo from DOJ—we have not edited it yet.”

“Just got it from DOJ. Here you go. Thanks,” Patel responded hours later.

The next day, Budowich told Patel that he had passed the draft along to the White House communications team, noting that the message needed to be pasted on DOJ and FBI letterhead, according to Raw Story.

Almost a week later, then–Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a “final version” to Budowich. It failed to meet Budowich’s expectations, however, lacking the identifying seal of the Justice Department.

“I need a version on letterhead,” Budowich repeated. “Someone needs to own this. I can’t give a doc to a reporter that could easily be confused with a [high school] term paper, so need to provide some validation of the doc.”

Diego Pestana, Blanche’s counsel, fulfilled Budowich’s request an hour and a half later.

“These records show that Kash Patel worked hand in hand with the former White House deputy chief of staff on the 2025 DOJ-FBI memo, which stated there would be no further investigation or release of the Epstein files,” Chris Swartz, senior counsel and deputy director of ethics and anti-corruption at the Democracy Defenders Fund, told Raw Story.

“It’s deeply concerning that the FBI coordinated with the White House on this memo, given President Trump’s well-documented association with Jeffrey Epstein and Trump’s frequent mention in the files,” Swartz added.

BOYS AT PLAY: Trump and Epstein memorialized in bronze.