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Trump and his regime of murderous fascists were already peeing their diapers over the midterms. Now, they’re going to be in a full-blown panic. How do we know? Just listen to them. After weeks and months of “Let them eat cake!”, the regime is suddenly deeply concerned about the common man:

Top Trump political adviser says president will focus on affordability going forward

Fresh off Democrats’ clean sweep of the 2025 off-year elections, President Donald Trump plans to refocus his political messaging on affordability, James Blair, the political director for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and the RNC, told POLITICO in an exclusive interview Wednesday.

“The president is very keyed into what’s going on, and he recognizes, like anybody, that it takes time to do an economic turnaround, but all the fundamentals are there, and I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of living,” Blair, who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff, said in an interview on “The Conversation” with Dasha Burns.

Who the fuck do they think they’re kidding? Besides Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza, of course.

I swear to god, the first article I see claiming that Trump is “pivoting” towards the economy is going to make me vomit. Trump is not keyed into what’s going on. He has no fucking idea what’s happening in this country because he’s being fed propaganda by Stephen Miller and Russ Vought. He’s a puppet suffering from severe dementia.

It should be noted that in the run-up to Tuesday’s elections, Trump was not out campaigning. The press failed to mention this. Was he too busy to help his party hold on to power in critical elections? He certainly had all the time in the world to play golf and tweet about his brand-new marble bathroom and obsess over his gaudy new ballroom. He definitely had more than enough time to throw himself a tacky Great Gatsby party in Florida.

But no campaigning. Trump LOVES to campaign. It’s what he lives for, but he was hardly out there helping Republicans win lose.

One might suggest that’s because Trump is no longer capable of sustained campaigning. Just the occasional public appearance. Good luck with the midterms, fellas.

Back to being a puppet. Trump, himself, has no real ideology. If he were actually paying attention, he might actually do something about affordability because he, personally, cares about what makes him look good or bad. It might also help if he actually had the most rudimentary understanding of how the economy worked. Or math. Or anything at all.

But Trump isn’t the one calling the shots. Not really. Tariffs weren’t his idea. The shutdown wasn’t his idea. Gutting healthcare wasn’t his idea. None of it was his idea. Everything destroying the economy came from Project 2025 and Stephen Miller’s white nationalist purge. They will not allow Trump to undo their life’s work and that would be the only way to deal with the affordability crisis we’re in.

Instead, what we’re going to see is the regime making token gestures and then lying nonstop about how absolutely AMAZING everything is. They were already bragging about the most incredible economy of all time until the damage became so severe, they gave up and said, “Eh. Wait until next year. Things get better. We swear!”

Now they’re back to swearing the economy is amazing. Well…OK. That’s the same mistake Biden made with a crucial difference: The economy was actually improving under Biden. Just not fast enough and not evenly enough. Affordability was a problem and Biden/Harris were punished for it.

Under Trump? The economy is crumbling, specifically because of Republican policies. Policies they’ve been bragging loudly about. Devastating manufacturing. Killing renewables and increasing the price of electricity. Cutting healthcare and the social safety net. All things the regime is very proud of.

It’s impossible to point at Democrats or trans kids or immigrants or Canadians and blame them. Everyone can see what’s happening and who did it. Worse, they can see Republicans ignoring the damage and crowing about how awesome everything is. They don’t just seem out of touch; they seem completely psychotic.

Slapping a few band-aids on won’t fix anything and will end up being even more insulting as Vought and Miller continue their destruction of the country. It’s not like Trump has the power to stop them. He’s not in control.

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Now, it’s really important to understand how the next year is going to play out.

No matter how many doomers say the midterms won’t happen, everything Trump and his lackeys say and do tell us otherwise.

If they were capable of rigging the voting machines, Tuesday’s elections would not have been so brutal. Democrats would have won, but it would have been a moderate win. No one controlling the machines would have allowed such an overwhelming beatdown.

This cannot be repeated enough: A stolen election has to be plausible. After the absolute slaughter on Tuesday, there is no plausible scenario where the GOP doesn’t lose the 2026 midterms. It cannot be sold to the public as a reasonable outcome.

After Pete Hegseth’s and Trump’s comically stupid gathering of the military’s top leaders, any possibility of a military coup is gone.

The generals and admirals are not going to betray their oaths for a clown and a senile mental patient.

Stephen Miller’s private army won’t be ready, either. ICE can’t find enough able-bodied Nazis. Also, the ones they’re finding are so fucking stupid, they’re failing open-book tests. Read that again. They cannot pass a test where they can look up the answers.

ICE is so desperate for bodies, they’re looking into hiring bounty hunters because they can’t find enough racist white men to do the job.

You think they’ll be capable of overthrowing an election in 12 months? They’re in court right now trying to cope with the horror of a sandwich being thrown at them.

So no, ICE will not be large enough to do a goddamn thing to the midterms. Besides, what would their legal rationale be? Are the voting machines undocumented? Fuck off.

The midterms are coming. Pay attention to what the regime does, not what they say. Everything they do for the next year will be panic and desperation and flailing to avoid the coming tsunami. Tuesday was just the beginning. Tuesday was the water pulling away from the shore. In the distance, those aren’t mountains. They’re waves. Our waves.

The regime is afraid because once they lose control of the House and the Senate (and they will), the investigations begin. Their fascist plan to end democracy grinds to a halt without a compliant Congress. They will not be able to cement themselves into power before the 2028 election, and another violent coup will not succeed. They only get one bite at that apple.

After that? It all goes downhill very quickly for the criminals of the Trump regime and all of their collaborators. So, yes, expect lots of noise about how the regime suddenly cares VERY deeply about affordability. But watch how everything they do is geared towards interfering with the midterms instead of actually delivering on their promises of a stronger economy.

Fascism is never about improving the world for the many or even for the “chosen people.” It’s always about breaking everything and enriching the rulers at the expense of everyone else. The run-up to the 2026 midterms is going to prove it.

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The Blue Wave is here! There are 361 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid and they should be. We are legion and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special-education services and learning technology. For both current and incoming governors, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.

The encourage governors to "unlock these resources" as if these are magic dollars stored in a lockbox somewhere and not dollars that are going to be redirected from the United States treasury to land instead in some private school's bank account. 

Democratic governors are reluctant to get into a program that "could be seen as undermining public schools." But hey-- taking these vouchers "doesn't take a single dollar from state education budgets" says Duncan, sounding exactly like DeVos when she was pushing the same damned thing. And this line of bullshit:

It simply opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.

"At no cost to taxpayers" is absolute baloney. Every dollar is a tax dollar not paid to the government, so the only possible result must be either reduction in services, reduction in subsidies, or increase in the deficit. I guess believing in Free Federal Money is a Democrat thing.

The "support students in public and nonpublic settings" is carefully crafted baloney language as well. Federal voucher fans keep pushing the public school aspect, but then carefully shading it as money spent on tutors or uniforms or transportation and not actual schools. And they are just guessing that any of that will be acceptable because the rules for these federal vouchers aren't written yet.

Duncan and Elorza want to claim that this money will, "in essence," replace the disappearing money from the American Rescue Plan Act. "In essence" is doing Atlas-scale lifting here because, no, it will not. The voucher money will be spent in different ways by different people on different stuff. They are not arguing that this money will help fund public schools-- just that it might fund some stuff that is sort of public education adjacent. 

But how about some "analysis" from Education Reform Now, which claims that the potential scale is significant." They claim that "the federal tax credit scholarship program could generate $3.1 billion in California, nearly $986 million in Illinois and nearly $86 million in Rhode Island each year," drifting ever closer to "flat out lie" territory, because the federal vouchers won't "generate" a damned cent. Pretending these numbers are real, that's $3.1 billion in tax dollars that will go to SGOs in the state instead of the federal government. It's redirected tax revenue, not new money. Will the feds just eat that $3.1 billion shortfall, or cut, say, education funding to California? Next time I get a flat tire, will I generate a new tire from the trunk? I think not.

In classic Duncan, he would like you to know that not following his idea makes you a Bad Person. Saying no to the federal vouchers is a "moral failure." 

Next up: Political advice.

Over the past decade, Democrats have watched our party’s historical advantage on education vanish.

Yeah, Arne, it's more than a decade, and it has happened because you and folks like you have decided that attacking and denigrating the public education system would be a great idea. You and your ilk launched and supported policies based on the assumption that all problems in school were the sole treatable cause of economic and social inequity in this country, and that those problems were the result of really bad teachers, so a program of tests followed by punishment would make things better in schools (and erase poverty, too). 

But now the GOP states are getting higher NAEP scores, so that means... something?

This is Democrats’ chance to regain the educational and moral high ground. To remind the country that Democrats fight to give every child a fair shot and that we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up, especially those left behind for too long.

Yes, Democrats-- you can beat the Republicans by supporting Republican policies. And that "we'll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up" thing? You had a chance to do that, and you totally blew it. Defund, dismantle and privatize public schools was a lousy approach. It's still a lousy approach.

Opting in to the federal tax credit scholarship program isn’t about abandoning Democratic values — it’s about fulfilling them.

When it comes to public education, it's not particularly clear what Democratic values even are these days, and my tolerance for party politics is at an all time low. But I am quite sure that the interests of students, families, teachers, and public education are not served by having the GOP offer a shit sandwich and the Democrats countering with, "We will also offer a shit sandwich, but we will say nice things about it and draw a D on it with mayonnaise." 

We have always heard that Arne Duncan is a nice guy, and I have no reason to believe that's not true. But what would really be nice would be for him to go away and never talk about education ever again. Just go have a nice food truck lunch with Betsy DeVos. 

When Pentagon journalists walked out rather than sign Donald Trump’s loyalty-style media agreement, it exposed just how far his administration is willing to go to control the narrative. But as DCReport’s founder David Cay Johnston explains, that may actually be good news for journalism — and for democracy.

In this episode of Reality Check, Johnston breaks down how Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, tried to force reporters to become Pentagon propagandists — and why their refusal could open the door to a new kind of accountability reporting.

At DCReport, we’ve proven for nearly nine years that you don’t need access, press conferences, or spin to uncover the truth — just persistence, public records, and independent thinking. Imagine if Pentagon coverage worked the same way.

📢 Watch below to learn why real journalism means covering what politicians do, not just what they say.

🔎 About DCReport:
Founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, DCReport.org is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how government actions affect you — not corporations, not politicians, not the powerful few.

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The post David Cay Johnston: Trump, the Pentagon and the War On Truth appeared first on DCReport.org.

Reproductive freedom is a core feminist principle. So are the rights of children. What happens, though, when those principles conflict? And in an era of incredible technological progress in assisted reproduction, should there be any limits to what women can choose?

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These questions (and many more) are raised in an absolutely must-read New York Times Magazine piece by friend-of-the-newsletter David Herbert (gift link here). Click over there and read the whole thing because spoilers are ahead, but the gist is that a woman named MaryBeth Lewis who lives in Rochester, NY is addicted to having children. She had an initial five in her 20s and 30s, and as her oldest children began to leave home, used IVF to have twins just before her 50th birthday. In her 50s she had another daughter, then twin boys at 55 (her 9th and 10th children), then a third set of twins at 59, and a 13th child at 63. She is clearly a dedicated mother and seems like a sweet lady, although everyone in her family recognizes she has a serious problem has been begging her for years to stop having baby after baby. MaryBeth’s husband seems, frankly, like both an enabler and an asshole. He’s a pilot, and basically a part-time dad, flying around the world while MaryBeth raised the kids — a situation they both seemed to prefer. Although, to be fair, MaryBeth did not raise the kids alone. MaryBeth’s other kids were predictably roped into raising the younger ones, with so much demanded of them that one failed out of college.

But all of this isn’t why MaryBeth’s story is a story. It’s because of her final attempt at having two more children, and the legal battles that ensued. Again, if you haven’t read the piece, go do that because the details are important, but basically MaryBeth decided she wanted two more kids but didn’t have any embryos left and couldn’t carry them herself; her husband, Bob, was also clear that he did not want any more children, and MaryBeth’s adult children were also begging her to stop reproducing. So MaryBeth forged Bob’s signature on a variety of documents, hired a surrogate, used the donor embryos from the same batch that had helped to create their youngest children, spent $160,000 of the couple’s money to pay for all of this, and impersonated Bob on a Zoom call with a judge to get a parentage order for custody of the twins the surrogate was carrying. In other words, she committed a series of frauds — upon her husband, upon the courts — to have two babies that she was not actually prepared to care for, as she was hitting retirement age.

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Bob found out, reported her, and a whole shitshow ensued in which the babies were put in foster care before MaryBeth could ever meet them. This is an inflection point, and to me a real question: Should the babies have been taken away and placed with a foster family? I think, despite MaryBeth’s clear shortcomings, her obvious mental health issues, and even her criminal acts, the answer should been no — certainly at the point where Bob said he would consent to accepting parentage of the children, the children should have been placed with MaryBeth and Bob, who by all accounts were able to provide a safe home.

But the children were taken away. Skip ahead two years and MaryBeth is on the brink of getting the babies back — babies who are not genetically related to her, who she did not carry, and who she has never actually met. Those babies are also no longer babies but toddlers who call another couple “mommy” and “daddy,” parents who read them “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?,” who are planning a second birthday party for them, and are desperately trying to adopt them. These children have never met MaryBeth or Bob.

Still, it sounds like MaryBeth might win — and “winning” means ripping two little kids away from the only parents and home they’ve ever known, to join a woman who is essentially a hoarder of children, to be raised not just by a nearly 70-year-old woman but by her many teenage children who are being forced to parent a bunch of little kids they never asked for. She even plans on changing their names, as if they’re puppies simply being rehomed.

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The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about Senate Republicans toying with the idea of ending the filibuster so they could get out of the disaster they’ve trapped themselves in.

Senate GOP leadership has been rejecting the idea for extremely good reasons I explained in the article and will get into again later. But here’s me writing the most obvious prediction ever:

That means eventually, Trump will almost certainly order Senate Republicans to end the filibuster and end the shutdown. Then Thune and his party of craven cowards will either have to obey their god emperor and destroy their party, or save themselves and risk his wrath.

And here we are, with Trump doing exactly that - ordering the Senate GOP to end the filibuster (sorry for subjecting you to Trump screeching):

What’s happening here? I thought Republicans were loving the shutdown and wallowing in the misery they were causing? I thought this was their big chance to destroy the federal government and really stick it to the Demtards?

Well…yes and no.

Republicans are arsonists. They set fires with the explicit understanding that Democrats will put them out. This is why they set fire to anything and everything, including their own base and things they, the GOP, actually care about. They know that Democrats will step in and keep the fire from burning out of control. And then Republicans can point to the damage and blame…Democrats.

Very stupid people see this as kabuki theater. The uniparty! Both sides are working together! It’s all a scam to fool the public.

These people do not understand the core concepts of who and what the Republican and Democratic Parties are. At their essence, Republicans are people who do not care if Americans live or die. And in the last 15-20 years, they’ve become a straight-up death cult, strongly leaning in the “preferably dead” direction.

Democrats, on the other hand, whatever you say about them, you cannot argue that they have spent decades trying to keep Americans alive. Medicare. Medicaid. Social Security. SNAP. The ACA. Funding for cancer treatment and vaccines. Pretty much every piece of the social safety net comes from us and is despised by the right.

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So…Republicans shut the government down, refusing to restore healthcare to tens of millions of Americans. They set another fire and assumed Democrats would put it out because that’s what Democrats do.

Playbook: ”White House officials had been running an informal pool at the start of the shutdown over how long the whole thing would last. The longest anyone predicted was 10 days.”

But Democrats are refusing to put out the GOP’s fire and Republicans don’t really know what to do about it. The only thing they can think of is doubling down again and again to make things worse.

They illegally cut SNAP to 42 million households, which include over 20 million children. A judge ordered the federal government to not deliberately starve its own citizens, but even with the order, there will be a break in services that will last weeks.

Understand that: Republicans, the party of “pro-life” and “pRoTeCt ThE cHiLdReN!!!” took active steps to impose hunger on children in an attempt to gain a political advantage.

But it’s worse than that. They illegally ordered grocery stores not to help out SNAP recipients on their own:

Several grocery chains and food delivery apps have announced in recent days that they would provide substantial discounts to those whose Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits have been delayed. More than 1 in 8 Americans rely on the program, and 39% of them are children.

But on Sunday, Catherine Rampell, a reporter at the Washington Post published an email from the USDA that was sent to grocery stores around the country, telling them they were prohibited from offering special discounts to those at greater risk of food insecurity due to the cuts.

Republicans truly are the worst fucking people to ever exist in America.

The goal here is to ramp up the cruelty and suffering to force the Democrats to break, but it’s not working. Democrats are still refusing to smother the Republicans’ out-of-control fire. The public is increasingly mad at the GOP after originally blaming both sides, with slightly more blame landing on the right.

Accordingly, Trump and his regime are getting “frustrated” with the shutdown. It was supposed to be quick and easy. Democrats were supposed to cave and put out the fire. Another fast win for the “unstoppable” dictator, not a long, protracted fight. Trump doesn’t like long, protracted fights. They’re boring and confusing, and he’d rather play with his toys.

So now the Mad King is demanding Senate Republicans scrap the filibuster so they can end the shutdown.

If you read my previous articles about why Republicans have not and will not risk eliminating the filibuster, you know why this is freezing the marrow in their bones. If not, allow me to considerably brighten your day.

The thing you need to understand here, and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo agrees with me, is that the filibuster is the only thing keeping the Republican Party from oblivion. It MUST exist for Republicans to obstruct progress or Democrats can erase them from the face of the earth in a single election cycle.

Sounds crazy, right? But it’s not. I keep saying this, but all Democrats have to do is pass a Voting Rights Act that eliminates gerrymandering and voter suppression, and that is the end of the GOP. Like that. Poof.

The 6 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court can attempt to strike it down, but without the filibuster, Democrats can add 5 seats, and that’s the end of that. What are Republicans going to do? Accuse Democrats of being fascists? For…expanding voting rights? That might land harder if they hadn’t just spent the last decade being openly fascist and loudly praising Hitler.

This means Republicans are in an impossible position.

• Get rid of the filibuster and watch their future evaporate.

• Refuse Trump and suffer his considerable wrath as the shutdown grinds on and Republicans pay a steep price in the midterms.

I know conventional wisdom is that the public will not remember the shutdown by next November. Possibly. But people will remember their children going without enough food. That happened to me for one week when I was five, and I still remember it vividly. That was almost half a century ago, and I still carry those scars. I feel as if the parents of the 20 million children Republicans are hurting are going to remember a year from now.

And that’s aside from the other millions of people who are going to lose their healthcare even if Republicans relent and restore some or most of the money they stole from the ACA and Medicaid.

These are people’s lives Republicans are directly harming in very tangible and lasting ways. They’re going to remember.

The longer this goes on, the worse it will be for the people of the country AND the Republican Party AND the regime. That means Trump will increase the pressure on the Senate Republicans to end the filibuster.

Then it just becomes a question of ending the short-term pain or enduring it to avoid the long-term death of the party.

Personally, I very much want Senate Republicans to cave to Trump’s stupidity. Yes, millions will lose their healthcare. Yes, Republicans will do terrible things for the next three years. But they will not hold onto power, and without the filibuster to hold the vast majority of the electorate back, their entire corrupt project dies.

We should only be so lucky that Republicans are so spineless1 and Trump continues to be so unbelievably dumb.2

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun, and the fascist fucks are scared. There is 1 day until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.