Will things go dark on October 1? Photo: Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg/Getty Images
To a lot of people, the prospect of a government shutdown whenever federal funding is on the brink of being interrupted is like the threat of an apocalyptic earthquake: something often discussed but rarely experienced. Somehow or other, even in a time of vast partisan polarization, the politicians find ways to keep the government operating, in part because no one wants to get blamed for the human suffering and widespread inconveniences associated with a shutdown.
We’re facing another “shutdown crisis” at the end of this month as the stopgap spending bill enacted in March expires on September 30. And though we’re just a couple of weeks away from the fish-or-cut-bait moment, Republicans and Democrats are not even negotiating over a temporary, much less permanent, resolution. Democrats are acutely aware that a spending bill to keep the government open is their only point of leverage in a Congress where nearly every other kind of business is conducted via special rules that prohibit Senate filibusters. On this and only this occasion, Republicans need Democratic votes. But in a nearly identical situation in March, the GOP offered zero concessions to get those votes, and after lots of empty talk about resistance, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer rounded up enough votes from his party to help Republicans break a brief filibuster and have their way.
The palpable fury of Democratic activists at Schumer’s “surrender,” and six more months of Trump power grabs with the connivance of the Republican Congress, have made Democrats far more willing to risk blame for a shutdown unless they get real concessions. They seem to have largely agreed on an extension of soon-to-expire Obamacare premium subsidies needed to head off huge insurance-cost spikes for millions of Americans as the minimum trophy they must secure before agreeing to keep the government open. But Republicans, who are divided on the Obamacare subsidies, have adopted the tack of offering (or demanding) a “clean CR,” a simple extension of current government spending levels until November 20, allegedly to give Congress more time to work out individual appropriations bills that will set funding levels for the next year. That means no concessions or even “sweeteners” for Democrats for the time being.
So the big question now is whether Democrats will go for a short-term “clean CR” on grounds they really haven’t “caved,” they’ve just given themselves more time to put pressure on the people running the country. But for the moment, the two parties in Congress are talking past each other with each side accusing the other of an unwillingness to negotiate.
There are additional irritants at play that didn’t exist back in March. The serial defiance of Congress’s spending power by the Trump administration has actually intensified as OMB director Russell Vought asserts the power to withhold previously approved funding for programs the administration doesn’t like. And while the authoritarian nature of Trump 2.0 was already becoming evident in March, it’s now an established fact that the president is pushing all known boundaries to presidential power to the breaking point with (so far) cooperation from the U.S. Supreme Court. The other recent development that may make it harder than ever for Democrats to cut any bipartisan spending deal is Trump’s big push to tip the scales in the 2026 midterm elections by getting red states like Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Florida, and South Carolina to redraw congressional maps that were supposed to last a decade in order to give the GOP more House seats (with a retaliatory re-redistricting occurring in California and perhaps some other blue states).
There’s a new wild card in the deck after last week’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In an Oval Office address, the president essentially blamed the murder on “the radical left,” a term he uses interchangeably with “Democrats,” and threatened unspecific but drastic action to avenge Kirk’s death. Will this further poison any negotiations between Republicans and Democrats? Will it make Democrats more determined to make a stand, or more fearful of inadvertently giving Donald Trump a pretext for even more authoritarian conduct? Compared with the current atmosphere, the gut check for Democrats in March was child’s play.
The Republican voice we needed to hear. Photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
In the immediate wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah earlier this week, before there was any real information on the identity or motives of the assassin, President Donald Trump addressed the nation with an angry screed blaming the “radical left” (his term for Democrats) for the crime and vowing official vengeance against those who had allegedly inspired the killing by uttering high-volume insults at Kirk and other MAGA folk.
From that point, we all held our breaths in anticipation of the terrible moment when the assassin would be connected tangibly to one of America’s political or culture-war “tribes” and efforts like Trump’s to assign collective responsibility gained real steam.
This morning, after a rather clumsy leak by the president on Fox & Friends, a press conference featuring federal, state, and local law-enforcement figures and presided over by Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, officially unveiled the name of the suspect, 22-year-old Utah student Tyler Robinson, along with some preliminary data from discovered evidence suggesting “anti-fascism” might be his motive. You could hear the engines of partisan and ideological vengeance getting ready to rev up across the internet.
But then Cox seized the spotlight with an extended and heartfelt call for a de-escalation of efforts to assign collective responsibility for the assassination. He even quoted Charlie Kirk himself on the essential nature of “forgiveness” and implicitly repudiated Trump’s claim that the “radical left” had incited the killer with anti-MAGA rhetoric:
We need moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody.
He went on to cite the pacific reaction from his own state to a crime many of them deplored for ideological, moral, and religious reasons:
As it happens, Cox, who is getting more national exposure than ever before, has made this sort of call for civility a hallmark of his political career. He apologized to a Utah LGBTQ+ group for his own past homophobia after the Pulse-nightclub murders in Florida in 2016. As National Governors Association chairman in 2023–24, he spearheaded a “Disagree Better” initiative to foster less-polarized bipartisan conversation. And when he broke from his own history of disdain for Donald Trump (not unusual among Utah Republicans) to endorse him in 2024, it was because he naïvely imagined that Trump’s own near brush with death might make him more amenable to a “national unity” message.
Now that there is at least a shred of evidence linking the prime suspect to “the left” (though a lot more suggesting he’s a mentally ill young man living in an essentially apolitical gamer fantasy universe), we get to find out if Cox’s pleas that Kirk’s assassination not be politicized strike a chord among his fellow partisans, beginning with Trump himself.
The next move is Trump’s. But he must implicitly or explicitly respond to Cox and his call for peace — the kind of peace we used to expect presidents to supply when the country was in turmoil.
Utah governor Spencer Cox announced at a Friday morning press conference that a suspect had been arrested in connection with Kirk’s murder on Wednesday at Utah Valley University and named Robinson. Earlier on Fox & Friends, President Donald Trump announced that a suspect was in custody, but did not name him.
“On the evening of September 11, a family member of Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend, who contacted the Washington County Sheriff’s office with information that Robinson had confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident,” Cox said.
The “family member” was Robinson’s father, and the “family friend” was a youth pastor, according to several outlets. CNN reported:
The father of the Charlie Kirk shooting suspect who was taken into custody identified his son from photos that had been made public, according to a law enforcement official.
The father told his son to turn himself in. He also called a youth pastor to assist. The pastor called the US Marshals, who took the suspect into custody.
Investigators then reviewed surveillance video and identified Robinson arriving on campus at Utah Valley on Wednesday at 8:29 a.m., according to Governor Cox. Kirk was shot at 12:23 p.m. MT while addressing a crowd.
Surveillance video showed the suspect driving a gray Dodge Challenger. A family member confirmed Robinson owned a car of that make and model.
Cox said the footage showed Robinson wearing a plain maroon t-shirt, light-colored shorts, a black cap with a white logo, and light-colored shoes. Robinson was wearing clothing matching that description when investigators approached him in the early morning hours on September 12.
Authorities found a rifle wrapped in a dark towel on Thursday in a wooded area on the edge of campus, according to the governor. It was a Mauser bolt-action rifle with a scope mounted on it.
Cox said investigators also interview Robinson’s roommate, who showed them Discord messages he had exchanged.
The messages showed the phone contact “Tyler” stating “a need to retrieve a rifle from a drop point, leaving the rifle in a bush, messages related to visually watching the area where a rifle was left, and a message referring to having left the rifle wrapped in a towel,” according to Cox. In the messages “Tyler” also referred to engraving bullets, having a unique rifle with a scope, and changing outfits.
Cox said authorities believe the suspect acted alone.
“Only one person is responsible, and he’s in custody,” Cox said.
What could go wrong here? Photo: Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images
On September 23, the federal government will be exactly one week away from shutting downabsent congressional action.
There’s another thing about that date you should know: It’s when Democrat Adelita Grijalva will almost certainly be elected to the House seat in Arizona that was made vacant by her father’s death earlier this year. As soon as she is sworn in, she’s expected to join every other House Democrat in signing on to what’s known as a “discharge petition” that will bring the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a bill to force the Department of Justice to immediately release all the files in its possession, to the House floor for a vote. With four Republicans already signed on, this should bring the total number of petitioners to 218, a majority, giving Speaker Mike Johnson and the congressional leadership no choice but to give it a vote. The timing couldn’t be much worse, particularly for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
The government-shutdown negotiations will be complex and time consuming, but the dynamics generally favor Republicans. They’ll be in a position to draft the measure that will be the vehicle for avoiding a shutdown and can make it as tempting or repellent to Democrats as they choose, depending on how they want the crisis to end. And that’s assuming they want it to end without a shutdown that many of them would happily greet. Democrats will be in a position to kill another spending bill with a Senate filibuster, or to cut a bipartisan deal if one is on offer, or to “cave” again and earn the fury of the party base. Some Democrats think an agreement to extend the Obamacare premium subsidies due to expire at the end of the year would be a sufficient trophy,for instance. The White House will dictate the GOP strategy during the government-shutdown talks, and Republicans will fall in line. That’s an asset Democrats can only envy, and it’s why they probably aren’t going to “win” the spending negotiations.
The Epstein files legislation, however, unites Democrats and divides Republicans, precisely at the time Republican solidarity will be more essential than ever. Word is that the White House is already putting the screws to the four House Republicans who have signed the discharge petition. One of them, Thomas Massie, who is co-sponsoring the bill with Democrat Ro Khanna, is a professional troublemaker who has already crossed Trump in the past and survived a MAGA primary challenge. Two of the other three, Lauren Boebert and her frenemy Marjorie Taylor Greene, have longstanding ties to the QAnon conspiracy crowd for whom cabals of sexual predators are the keys to understanding all world affairs. And the fourth, Nancy Mace, is running for governor of South Carolina and accusing one of her rivals of going easy on sexual-abuse offenders, including her own former fiancé. These four will be nearly impossible to move on the Epstein bill and Republicans can’t use too much force without risking their support for the spending measures needed to keep Democrats on the defensive and out of power.
Successful discharge petitions are so rare that the precise rules for dealing with them are a bit murky. Johnson could probably exercise some delaying tactics prior to the vote and, even if it passes, getting the Justice Department to comply over Trump’s objections would be difficult to put it mildly. Only Trump himself probably knows exactly how much damaging material is in danger of floating into the atmosphere like radioactive fallout. But after all these months when everything Trump did was described as a “distraction” from the Epstein files by those who were certain it was deadly for him, the Epstein files themselves are proving to be the biggest distraction of all.
More than any other recent ruling in the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, known to critics as the “shadow docket” for the speed and darkness with how decisions are made, the order in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo has people who don’t normally follow these things up in arms. A friend from Peru messaged me, out of the blue, to try to make sense of it for him. “Please explain how the Supreme Court could come to this conclusion!” he implored.
I couldn’t, for the simple reason that the court’s supermajority didn’t offer an explanation. That is, there was no reasoning to accompany an order that lifted a judge’s injunction that, for the better part of two months, sought to prevent federal agents from makingindiscriminate stops and arrests of workers in the Los Angeles area — a campaign against work itself that has swept up people who are a threat to no one else but Stephen Miller: day laborers at Home Depot, car washers, garment-factory workers, farm workers, you name it. Not even fruteros are spared. (The government hasn’t been complying exactly, but that’s another discussion.)
The judge’s ruling was common sense: Under the Fourth Amendment, which protects everyone against unreasonable searches and seizures, a person’s race or ethnicity, the language they speak, or the kinds of jobs they hold or seek cannot be the basis for immigration sweeps and detention. Yet a silent majority of the Supreme Court blocked that ruling, with no explanation. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, didn’t hold back: “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job,” she wrote.
Brett Kavanaugh, who just last week tried to assuage judges that the Supreme Court could be doing a better job explaining its work in the shadows, opted to shed some light on this latest decision. In the process, he laid bare his own ignorance about Los Angeles, immigrant workers, communities in which their work is valued, and what the rest of us have been seeing with our own eyes regarding these immigration raids. The tell is near the top of his concurring opinion, which no other justice joined and states as fact something that isn’t: “Illegal immigration is especially pronounced in the Los Angeles area, among other locales in the United States.”
Anyone who knows even a little bit about Los Angeles, New York City, the District of Columbia, or other “locales” where immigrants breathe, live, work, and have families — many of them married to U.S. citizens, with children born here, or other deep roots — can attest that “illegal immigration,” the way Kavanaugh conceives of it, is a mirage. People with immigrant backgrounds simply exist in these cities and communities, and no one — except immigration authorities — goes around wondering who is or isn’t an immigrant, who does or doesn’t have papers, who crossed the border or flew in and overstayed their tourist visa. That just isn’t a thing. In many parts of California, there are people of Mexican descent whose families predated the Mexican-American War. Merely questioning their right to belong offends their very sense of self.
Kavanaugh appears to deeply care about who belongs and who doesn’t, at one point referencing a trope that anti-immigration proponents like to advance — that there are people who “are not only violating the immigration laws but also jumping in front of those noncitizens who follow the rules and wait in line to immigrate into the United States through the legal immigration process.” A notion that is cut from the same cloth as the so-called good-immigrant-bad-immigrant binary.
But even assuming that people cared about a person’s provenance, or whether they had authorization to be here, or carried identification with them, not only would the inquiry inevitably ensnare U.S. citizens, as has been the case; it would sweep far more than the modest, low-wage work and workers implicated by the Supreme Court’s decision. As Ahilan Arulanantham, an immigration scholar from Los Angeles, told me not too long ago, in Southern California specifically, “there are undocumented lawyers, there are undocumented accountants, there are undocumented doctors, lots of small-business owners, some people with advanced degrees.” In this reality, he added, the Trump administration’s onslaught “is felt actually throughout the social and economic fabric of the city.”
Worse still, the way Kavanaugh imagines these immigration sweeps to be are detached from the reality of their violence and duration. Pointing to the Immigration and Nationality Act and its regulations, which otherwise allow the government to “briefly detain” a person if agents have “a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned … is an alien illegally in the United States,” Kavanaugh thinks this dragnet of racial profiling allows people to experience a short inconvenience before they resume their daily activities. “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” he writes. “If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.”
As Sherrilyn Ifill, a civil-rights lawyer and the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund observed on Substack, just about everything Kavanaugh wrote in that rundown has no support in the factual record of the case, let alone the public record that we ourselves have had to bear witness to. “Every aspect of this description is belied by the reality that appears on our televisions and online every day.” She added: “But who are you going to believe — Justice Kavanaugh or your lying eyes? Kavanaugh’s description reads as though it were downloaded from the Department of Homeland Security’s website.”
But even if this fantasy world that Kavanaugh imagines were true, there’s the added complication that no law supersedes the Constitution. As Justice Sotomayor points out in dissent, even if such a made-up statute existed, “no Act of Congress can authorize a violation of the Constitution,” and it is up to judges to “decide whether the Fourth Amendment allows” these kinds of unreasonable stops.
All of this leads me to wonder: Has Brett Kavanaugh ever pulled up to a Home Depot to hire a day laborer to work on his backyard? Has he bought fresh-cut mangoes from a frutero? What about getting his car vacuumed and washed by an ensemble of workers? Does he leave a tip for the Central American hotel worker who cleans up his rooms? Has he gotten his hair cut by a Dominican barber? And can he imagine himself interacting with any of these workers, who may or may not be undocumented, during an ICE sweep that lands them in an unmarked vehicle, manned by masked agents of the state, subjecting them and their families to untold trauma until their release, which may not happen for days, if at all? Because I’ve done all of those things, and I can — and now I wonder if I might one day be swept up with them, too.
If he can’t do that, then it might have been wiser to keep silent, like his colleagues in the majority did — and wait until the issue returns to the Supreme Court. Because the issue will return — if not in the same California case, in another one from New York, D.C., or another city where the president of the United States has been dreaming of a national police force, unbound by law.
The ability to retaliate against Donald Trump’s power grabs and other outrages is a rare pleasure for Democrats, which is why Gavin Newsom’s counter-gerrymandering effort in California is so wildly popular among Democrats. If Democrats can’t stop Trump’s egregious policies in Congress (and they really can’t) and the U.S. Supreme Court is either enabling him or slow-walking efforts to rein him in (which it clearly is), then they need different arenas in which to contest his authoritarian ways. Since Trump chose to intervene in state-government prerogatives by ordering the Texas legislature to grab the GOP some new U.S. House districts, it made perfect sense for California to respond, even though it would require a constitutional amendment enacted via an insanely expensive ballot-initiative fight.
But Democrats shouldn’t reflexively ape Trump’s every excess, particularly in formulating an agenda for their eventual return to power. They currently have the high ground with a small but strategically critical share of voters who dislike partisan power grabs no matter who is carrying them out. These voters may not want to restore Democrats to power in 2026 or 2028 if they believe that when it comes to lawless conduct, “both sides do it.” It’s not some sort of lack of fighting spirit that makes Democrats value the Constitution, including such key restraints on presidential power as the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights. An essentially stable system of laws and institutions is what can keep America from lurching back and forth between authoritarian governments of the left and right every four years and eventually a meltdown of democracy itself.
Fortunately, much as many rank-and-file Democrats would relish a tit-for-tat fight to the end, current Democratic retaliatory efforts are measured and, more important, are necessary to the occasion.
Newsom’s Prop 50 isn’t a legislative coup like the one in Texas; it places the prospective congressional map before voters for their approval or disapproval. It doesn’t scrap California’s nonpartisan redistricting system in favor of the kind of pure legislative powers enjoyed by Texas Republicans; it puts it aside until the next regular round of redistricting when it will be resumed. And its goal isn’t some sort of Democratic seizure of power along the lines that Trump and his party are undertaking every day; its goal is to break the GOP trifecta in Washington next year so that Congress will no longer be a pure rubber stamp for whatever the president wants, making it possible for something approaching normalcy during the last two years of the Trump era.
Making that happen, and then presenting 2028 a real referendum on the future of the country, is the prize Democrats should value above the emotional satisfaction of turning the tables on Trump or the GOP once they return to power. It’s hard to maintain any sense of restraint or equilibrium about politics and government right now but, with skill and luck, we’ll someday remember this moment as a terrible aberration rather than a new normal.
Is legislation from the obscure backbench House Republican Jen Kiggans the key to avoiding a government shutdown? Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA/Reuters
At midnight on September 30, the government funding patch Congress enacted in March will expire. That means major federal functions will shut down if Congress and Donald Trump don’t intervene. The time frame for keeping the government open is actually shorter than that, since the House and Senate plan to be in recess for the Rosh Hashanah holiday on the week of September 22.
Unlike the budget-reconciliation procedure that led to the enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill, appropriations measures can be filibustered in the Senate, so Republicans need Democratic votes to keep the government open. And the congressional minority is not particularly inclined to cooperate on another bipartisan spending patch as Democratic activists were incensed by their leaders’ cave on spending back in March. At a minimum, Democrats will need significant trophies if they are to supply the seven or eight Senate votes needed to quash a filibuster.
The most obvious trophy would be Trump agreeing to put the kibosh on his Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought’s provocative efforts to cancel previously appropriated spending by executive fiat, which has made Vought a devil figure to people on both sides of the aisle in Congress (not that the Republicans will say anything publicly). In the unlikely event the president did rein in Vought, that might not be enough to tempt Democrats into a spending deal since the threat of a government shutdown is their only bit of leverage for the foreseeable future. Senator Elizabeth Warren has suggested she would only vote for a spending bill if Republicans agreed to scrap the Medicaid cuts in the OBBBA, which is about as likely as Rand Paul joining the Democratic Socialists.
There is one thing that could lure Democrats into voting to keep the government open: a bipartisan effort to extend the tax credits (set to expire at the end of the year) that make Obamacare premiums affordable for a lot of middle-class Americans who get their health insurance from the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act. As Punchbowl News reports, Republicans are nervous about the spikes in premiums, which will happen as early as November 1 (when open enrollment for Obamacare policies begins) if Congress doesn’t act to extend the subsidies:
Letting the premium subsidies lapse could lead to more than 4 million people losing health insurance, according to the CBO. Longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin recently said the issue would be the party’s “greatest midterm threat.”
Inflation and rising costs of living are already a looming political liability for the GOP heading into 2026. Republicans are also under heavy fire for the Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill. So the Obamacare cliff could make those problems worse.
Let’s be clear:Republicans are in charge of Washington, so if premiums go up or huge chunks of Americans lose their health-care coverage entirely, the GOP will get the blame. They privately acknowledge that.
On the other hand, most Republicans hate Obamacare, and for the House Freedom Caucus types who wield so much influence in the party right now, the idea of working with Democrats to salvage premium subsidies is anathema to everything they believe. It is theoretically possible, however, to discern a potential bipartisan coalition to get this done, and it could be a crucial lubricant for negotiations on a more general spending patch as well. There’s even a legislative vehicle in place, per Punchbowl News:
A group of vulnerable House Republicans and moderate Democrats is introducing a bill that would extend the subsidies for a year, pushing the deadline beyond the midterms. This could cost around $24 billion, based on the CBO’s estimate last year.
Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) is leading the bill along with GOP Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Rob Bresnahan (Pa.), Carlos Gimenez (Fla.), David Valadao (Calif.), Young Kim (Calif.), Jeff Hurd (Colo.), Tom Kean (N.J.) and Juan Ciscomani (Ariz.). Democratic Reps. Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) and Jared Golden (Maine) have signed on, too.
As a sign of the GOP Zeitgeist, Representative Jen Kiggans professes to dislike the Obamacare subsidies but argues they should be carefully phased out rather than abruptly terminated. So in any potential deal the length of the extension could be a big sticking point. And if extending the subsidies indeed becomes the glue that could seal a spending patch, there remain a host of disagreements over the length of the patch and whether any spending reductions accompany it.
Aside from the partisan dynamics in the House and Senate, the entire health-care industry is mobilizing a lobbying blitz to save the subsidies, which are of particular concern to the health insurers that pocket them. Their efforts should keep things bubbling in Congress even if Democrats and Republicans are loathe to reach a deal. It’s possible Democrats will insist on at least a brief government shutdown to show “the base” they are willing to fight Trump’s power grabs. But the unlikely topic of Obamacare could yet provide a bit of bipartisanship amid the chaos and authoritarianism of Trump’s Washington. Some Democrats who might otherwise consider a deal could look out their windows and see National Guard troops patrolling and balk at any accommodation of the GOP.
Trump is so committed to adding Midas-like touches to the White House that he had his Mar-a-Lago “gold guy” flown in on Air Force One, as TheWall Street Journalreported in April:
A cabinetmaker from south Florida who has worked on projects at Mar-a-Lago, John Icart helped add custom-made gold finishes to the Oval Office, including gilded carvings for the fireplace mantel and the molding that wraps around the most famous office in the world, administration officials said. Icart traveled to Washington with Trump on Air Force One, according to one of the officials. He declined to comment, referring questions to the White House.
This involved festooning the Oval Office with gold furniture and various trinkets, and adding gold carvings to the fireplace and crown molding:
Administration officials said Trump personally oversaw the installation of the gold carvings on the mantel in the Oval Office. He also brought gold cherubs from Mar-a-Lago to be installed in the White House.
Prominently displayed next to the Resolute Desk is a large gold FIFA World Cup trophy. Seven gold vases and urns decorate the mantle.
… Trump has affixed a gold Trump crest over the door leading into the White House from the colonnade, a recent visitor said. There are gold coasters with Trump’s name on side tables.
These accents are “of the highest quality” and are being paid for by the president himself, according to a Fox News report that was light on details:
A White House spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the gold Trump added to the Oval Office “is of the highest quality,” declining to provide further details. The spokesperson also said that Trump personally covered the cost of the gold accents, though did not specify how much gold was added or how much Trump spent.
However, as explained by BuzzFeed, the moldings looks oddly similar to accents available for as low as $30 on Home Depot’s website.
For comparison, this is what the Oval Office looked like in the last year of the Biden administration:
Photo: Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
And this is what it looks like now:
Photo: Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
This is actually pretty impressive, considering that gold paint doesn’t exist:
Trump at Tuesday’s press conference, alive and possibly well. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
The ongoing speculation about Donald Trump’s hand bruise and health issues reached a fever pitch over Labor Day weekend, as the president had not made a public appearance since August 26. So there was already a lot of anticipation for his next appearance heading into the workweek. Then the White House amped things up by teasing that Trump would reveal something big at his Tuesday press conference.
“The president will be making an exciting announcement related to the Department of Defense,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said cryptically.
Multiple theories emerged on what the president might say at his 2 p.m. presser. Would he give a big health update? Announce he was moving U.S. Space Command headquarters? Send the National Guard into Chicago?
The answer was kind of all of the above yet none of the above.
Technically, the big announcement was that Space Command headquarters will be relocated to Huntsville, Alabama. But this decision, a reversal of a Biden-administration decision to keep the HQ in Colorado, isn’t all that “exciting,” considering most Americans can’t tell Space Command from Space Force.
While taking questions at the meeting, Trump did say that it’s a matter of when he sends the National Guard into Chicago, not if.
But it seems the real point of the much-hyped press conference was simply to prove that Trump is still alive, despite what you may have read on social media.
“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” asked Peter Doocy during the Q&A. The Fox News correspondent then explained that he was referring to the viral rumors of Trump’s demise.
Trump claimed, somewhat implausibly, that he was unaware of the posts claiming he was no more. But then he said he had heard the reports that he was in poor health.
“I have heard, it’s sort of crazy, but last week I did numerous news conferences, all successful, they went very well, like this is going very well, and then I didn’t do any for two days and they said, ‘There must be something wrong with him,’” he said. “Biden wouldn’t do them for months. You wouldn’t see him. And nobody ever said there was anything wrong with him and we know he wasn’t in the greatest of shape.”
This prompted forced laughter from Vice-President J.D. Vance and other officials gathered in the Oval Office.
Aside from this denial, Trump did not give any significant updates on his health situation. His hand makeup looked a little better on Tuesday, but it’s clear his big bruise is still there.
So we’ve learned two important things today. First, Trump is still healthy enough to stand up and deliver rants on his usual topics. Second, don’t trust the White House when it promises “exciting news,” as you might wind up watching a bunch of Alabama lawmakers muse about how “space is the ultimate high ground.”
Will Melania Trump appear on the cover of Vanity Fair? The question has been the source of much media gossip this week, after Semafor reported that the magazine’s new global editorial director, Mark Guiducci, “told people he’s potentially interested” in putting the First Lady on the cover as part of a broader effort to woo conservative readers.
Within hours, the Daily Mailreported that Vanity Fair staffers were threatening to revolt if Giuducci followed through with the idea:
“I will walk out the motherf – – – – – – door, and half my staff will follow me,” a mid–level editor told the Daily Mail on Monday, hours after Semafor reported the magazine’s new global editorial director Mark Guiducci was trying to woo Melania to star on his cover.
“We are not going to normalize this despot and his wife; we’re just not going to do it. We’re going to stand for what’s right,” the staffer continued.
“If I have to work bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s, I’ll do it. If [Guiducci] puts Melania on the cover, half of the editorial staff will walk out, I guarantee it.”
“It sickens me,” the staffer added. “Even the idea of it.”
The prospect of unrest at the publication made MAGA world salivate. Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt promised to “buy several [copies] if they would do this, just to prove a point.” And several Trump influencers, including Charlie Kirk and Laura Ingraham, were apparently duped by an obviously fake mock-up of a Melania Vanity Fair cover:
But it seems no one is going to have to have a meltdown or start a new career at Trader Joe’s. It turns out Melania — who is often not seen in public for weeks at a time — is simply too busy to sit for a magazine photo shoot. “Page Six” reported that the First Lady has absolutely no interest in a Vanity Fair cover:
A fashion source familiar with the First Lady’s thinking says she “laughed” at the Vanity Fair request in July and rejected it immediately.
“She doesn’t have time to be sitting in a photo shoot. Her priorities as First Lady are far more important … These people don’t deserve her anyway.”
The First Lady hasn’t said much about what’s on her agenda right now, but she did release a one-minute video this week announcing the Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge. The final judging will take place in June 2026, and it’s unclear if Melania will be personally involved, but perhaps she needs the next nine months to prepare.
In general, we’re all hearing way too much from the Trump family these days. Even if you try to avoid political news, Donald Trump and his kids are everywhere, politicizing your canned beans, beefing with your favorite pop stars, and ruining your Home Alone 2 rewatch. But there’s one Trump most Americans probably should know more about: Barron Trump. The president’s youngest son may be one of the most influential figures in U.S. politics, but he’s been keeping it quiet — literally. While the 19-year-old has been credited with helping craft his father’s winning 2024 election strategy, the public has barely heard him say a word.
Naturally, people have a lot of questions about the most mysterious Trump family member, from Okay, exactly how tall is Barron? to, weirdly, Does Barron have a beautiful singing voice? and Will he marry Sydney Sweeney? I will answer to the best of my ability below.
How old is Barron Trump?
Barron is now 19 years old. He was born on March 20, 2006. He is Melania Trump’s only child, and Donald Trump’s fifth child. (His eldest step-sibling, Don Jr., is 28 years older and his youngest, Tiffany, is 12 years older.)
Barron turned 18 in 2024, during his senior year of high school, which partly explains why he’s the least well-known Trump child. While the elder siblings were all adults during the first Trump administration, Barron was 10 when his father was sworn in and 14 at the end of his first term. Here’s video of Barron walking in the 2017 inauguration parade with his parents:
How tall is Barron Trump?
For years Barron’s exact height was unclear. All we knew for sure was that he had a few inches on his mother (who is five-foot-11) and his father (who is six-foot-three).
But on August 22, 2025, Trump mentioned his son’s height while hosting FIFA president Gianni Infantino at the White House. “He’s on the tall side for soccer,” Trump said of Barron. “He’s 6’9.”
Trump: I may play…I'm a very good athlete. My son is a good athlete. A good soccer player. On the tall side for soccer…I may put on shorts, I look extremely good in shorts, and join the play." pic.twitter.com/W5dcsqwLl1
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 23, 2025
Did Barron Trump really help his father win the 2024 election?
Maybe! Barron’s parents credited him with helping Donald Trump win over younger voters, and particularly young men, by getting him to do interviews with various podcasters and influencers.
“He was very vocal” in advising his father, Melania Trump toldFox & Friends in December. “He knew exactly who his father needs to contact and to talk to.”
Melania Trump on her son Barron:
“I’m very proud of him, about his knowledge even about politics. It was incredible how he brought in success because he knew exactly who his father needs to contact and to talk to.”pic.twitter.com/Uzp6l92Vls
Donald Trump gave his “very tall son” Barron a shout-out for devising his bro-focused strategy during his second inauguration.
“He knew the youth vote. You know, we won the youth vote by 36 points,” the president said, falsely. “And he was saying, ‘Dad you’ve got to go out and do this one and that one,’ and we did a lot of them. And he respects them all. He understood them very well. And he said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to got out, do Joe Rogan, do all these guys,’ and we did … he understood the market.”
How are Barron Trump’s computer skills?
Barron has an “unbelievable aptitude in technology,” according to his father. For example, he knows how to turn a laptop on.
Donald Trump on his son Barron: “He can look at a computer… I turn off his laptop, I said, ‘Oh good,’ and I go back about five minutes later, he’s got his laptop, I say, ‘How do you do that?’.. He’s got an unbelievable aptitude in technology."🤡 pic.twitter.com/YSsM6EJU1J
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 20, 2025
Where does Barron Trump go to college?
New York University. Barron graduated from Oxbridge Academy, a private school in Palm Beach, Florida, in May 2024 and started at NYU’s Stern School of Business in the fall.
Did Harvard reject Barron Trump?
We may never know for sure, but both Donald and Melania have denied this rumor.
As the Trump administration escalated its war on Harvard University, some speculated that the president was upset with the school for rejecting his youngest son. The First Lady said this is untrue in a statement emailed to several outlets in late May.
“Barron did not apply to Harvard, and any assertion that he, or that anyone on his behalf, applied is completely false,” Nick Clemens, spokesperson for the Office of the First Lady, said according to the Palm Beach Post.
During a July 2024 campaign rally in Florida, which Barron attended, his father said, “He’s now going to college, got into every college he wanted to.”
Does Barron live on campus at NYU?
No. He lives in Trump Tower, according toPeople. He was recently spotted arriving on campus “with a five-SUV motorcade while the Secret Service and NYPD monitored the area,” per “Page Six.”
Melania seemed to confirm that Barron is living in Trump Tower in a September 2024 interview with Fox News.
“It was his decision to come here that he wants to be in New York and study in New York and live in his home, and I respect that,” she said, adding, “I hope he will have a great experience because his life is very different than any other 18-, 19-year-old child.”
Is Barron popular on the NYU campus?
Barron is doing okay socially, according to an anonymous People source.
“He’s a ladies’ man for sure. He’s really popular with the ladies,” the “insider” said in December 2024. “He’s tall and handsome. A lot of people seem to think he’s pretty attractive — yes, even liberal people like him.”
And, surely to the college sophomore’s delight, his mom is reportedly watching him like a hawk.
“Melania watches Barron constantly in an effort to be sure nobody messes with him or bullies him, as this is a constant worry with her,” another source toldPeople in August 2025. “She always knows where he is and what he’s doing.”
Does Barron have a girlfriend?
During an October 2024 podcast appearance, Donald Trump said of his youngest son, “I don’t think he’s had a girlfriend yet.”
While Barron has not publicly debuted a significant other, there have been various rumors about his love life. Someone claimed to be his ex-girlfriend on social media, but I’m not going to dig around on a high-schooler’s TikTok account to confirm that.
On May 30, 2025, “a friend on campus” told NewsNation that Barron is now seeing someone:
A friend on campus told me, “Barron has a really nice girlfriend and hangs out with her a lot. He does have friends he just (unlike his father Donald Trump) screws the limelight.”
Barron is, according to my source, “much more like his mother, Melania — he keeps his head down and gets on with it. He is not trying to be BMOC (big man on campus).”
The source added, “Barron is pretty apolitical — he doesn’t get involved.”
Is Barron Trump dating Sasha Obama?
What? No. You may have seen a video on social media that claims, “Barron Trump has just announced that Sasha Obama will be his one and only wife. Donald Trump was so furious that he was rushed to a private hospital.” But as Snopes confirmed, this is ridiculous AI-generated slop.
Did Barron Trump really sing on America’s Got Talent?
Where would you get such an idea? Oh …
That’s an incredibly bad AI deepfake. According to the Daily Dot, lots of people have been falling for these videos in recent months, though they clearly don’t show the First Son, or even a real human:
Watching any single video should make it obvious that it’s fake. In some, Trump’s mouth doesn’t match the audio. In all of them, his image falls into uncanny valley territory—something that doesn’t quite look human, even to those who can’t articulate exactly why that is.
Snopes.com reported that fake videos of Barron singing “about his support for his father, and with heavy Christian faith-based references” started circulating in late 2024. The latest iterations show him performing on a singing competition show, with some actual footage from America’s Got Talent and American Idol spliced in.
To be clear, Barron has never appeared on a reality singing competition, or even delivered a speech in public like his siblings.
Have we ever heard Barron Trump’s voice?
Barron has only been heard speaking in a few rare videos. The first two are from his childhood. In this interview with Entertainment Tonight he talks about playing the drums:
There’s some more footage of little Barron at a photoshoot with his parents here:
And in this clip that aired in 2010 on Larry King Live, Barron declares, “I like my suitcase!” as he plays with a Louis Vuitton briefcase in his father’s office. After the clip aired, King noted that Barron had an accent. “He does; he spends most of his time with me,” Melania answered. Donald added, “I think it’s great.”
The “I like my sootcase” audio went viral when the clip resurfaced last summer. But apparently Barron has lost his Slovenian accent — though it’s a bit hard to tell since, incredibly, there are only two recent videos of him speaking.
In November, TMZ posted an eight-second video of Barron making small talk during a party at Mar-a-Lago, in which his voice is barely audible. A month later, we got another clip of Barron greeting UFC founder Dana White on Election Night in a preview of the documentary series Art of the Surge.
“It’s very nice to see you,” Barron says to someone off-camera, before shaking White’s hand and saying “Hello, how are you? It’s very nice to finally meet you.” Thrilling stuff!
Did an obscure 1889 book predict Barron Trump’s entire life and prove time travel is real?
Uh, maybe? Between 1889 and 1893, Ingersoll Lockwood published a collection of three stories — Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and his Wonderful Dog Bulger, Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey,and The Last President — about a rich, time-traveling lad named Baron Trump. Peoplesummarized the plot:
The character is introduced as a wealthy boy who lives in Trump Castle, similar to the president, who has a penthouse in Trump Tower. In the first two books, the character travels through time with his dog Bulger and meets various people from different cultures.
The final book, however, focuses on the rise of a controversial U.S. president. According to a synopsis, the country is “torn by division and dissent” and there are “references to a hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York,” where Trump Tower is located.
The president-elect is described as “an outsider” who causes a “chaotic atmosphere.”
Politico wrote about the book series’ newfound popularity in 2017. The titular character was described as someone who “can’t stop talking about his brain” and, once, successfully sued his tutors, “alleging that they owed him money for everything he had taught them.”
After reading the books for a 2017 Politico piece on the series’ newfound popularity, Jamie Fuller concluded: “The cherry-picked Lockwood titles might seem revelatory, but when seen among the rest of his work, he doesn’t look terribly prescient.”
So, I guess that’s reassuring? Honestly, I’m too spooked to read anything else about this subject, but feel free to do your own research.
After repeating the same dubious claims about the president’s hand-shaking injuries for months, Team Trump uncharacteristically gave in and offered an actual health update.
At a June 17 press conference, Leavitt said that after noticing mild swelling in his legs in recent weeks, Trump underwent a “comprehensive examination, including diagnostic vascular studies.”
She read a note from Trump’s physician that said the exam “revealed chronic venous insufficiency, ICD-9, a common condition, particularly in individuals over the age of 70.” However, there was “no evidence of deep-vein thrombosis or arterial disease,” and an echocardiogram found “no signs of heart failure, renal impairment, or systemic illness.”
Leavitt still attributed Trump’s hand bruising to hand shaking, but she acknowledged that the daily aspirin he takes as a preventative measure is also a factor. “This is consistent with minor soft-tissue irritation from frequent hand shaking and the use of aspirin, which is taken as part of a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen,” she said.
The White House released this note from Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, which concluded, “SUMMARY: President Trump remains in excellent health.”
There’s something increasingly strange about Donald Trump’s ongoing — indeed, intensifying — campaign to demand the sunniest possible view of American history from any institution he can influence or control. He made this an official priority in a March 27 executive order.
“It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing,” the order read.
Trump went on to say Washington, D.C., museumgoers must not be “subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” The order threatened to withhold Smithsonian Institution funding if it did not restore itself into a “symbol of inspiration and American greatness — igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.”
And he demanded that the Department of the Interior ensure that all public monuments under its jurisdiction “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
While he was at it, Trump ordered the reversal of steps to remove monuments during the Biden administration in a transparent effort to restore Confederate and neo-Confederate propaganda displays.
This wasn’t a passing fancy. Trump keeps coming back to the dire need to whitewash American history, as in this recent Truth Social tirade:
What makes this hostility to any evidence that America, over two and a half centuries, has lacked even a scintilla of Greatness so very strange is that no one has said more nasty and disparaging things about our country than Donald J. Trump during the most recent Democratic administrations.
Trump’s first Inaugural Address is remembered as the “American Carnage” speech because of its relentless picture of a desolate nation betrayed by its leaders. He said:
For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry;
Subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military;
We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own;
And spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.
We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.
One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.
The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.
Where’s the “Success” and “Brightness” in that portrait of America?
But that speech is indeed downright sunny compared to the depiction of America as a violent hellhole — indeed, as a failed state — presented by Trump every single day during his 2024 comeback campaign. According to his stump speech, the country was in the grip of vast immigrant gangs brought in to bankrupt the federal government, vote illegally (by the millions!), and “destroy democracy.” Worse yet, one of the country’s two major political parties was totally led and mostly supported by people who “hate America” and were fully in on the conspiracy to convert it into a magnet for the “worst people in the world” who poured out of prisons and mental institutions to take over our communities.
Even today, the president is still talking about this country as a vast dystopia. Again and again, he is claiming emergency conditions to justify his dramatic demands for unlimited executive powers. He speaks of our cities as ravaged by out-of-control crime so severe that a military response is necessary, hand-in-glove with a mass-deportation effort he constantly boasts of as unlike anything the country has seen before.
So as he nobly struggles to restore this hell on Earth, Trump is equally concerned with ensuring that the 232 years of American history leading up to the Obama and Biden eras are remembered with a gauzy glow inspiring gratitude, pride, and optimism.
No wonder his followers want to find veterans of those despicable administrations and lock them up. It was a perfect nation until 2008. And soon our museums will say so.
These days, being a social-media influencer with the ear of the president is more powerful than tenure in the U.S. Senate. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
Most people in political life have role models from the past that they venerate or imitate. Donald Trump, for example, is a big fan of former presidents Andrew Jackson and William McKinley. Some of his MAGA acolytes loveRichard Nixon. Lots of Democrats burn candles, literally or figuratively, to the memories of FDR, JFK, RFK (the senior, not the junior) and such quasi-political titans as Martin Luther King Jr.
In an interview with the Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, the notorious MAGA influencer (or perhaps more specifically, Trump-whisperer) Laura Loomer identified an unusual hero who may help inspire her career: Joseph R. McCarthy.
I suggested at one point that her effort to get federal employees fired for supposed disloyalty to Trump recalled the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the private musings and personal associations of alleged communist sympathizers to end their careers. She loved that.
“Joseph McCarthy was right,” Loomer responded without missing a beat. “We need to make McCarthy great again.”
Loomer may have been kidding; her whole act could be described as having a deadly serious core wrapped in candy-coated trolling. But maybe she wasn’t. Despite his censure by a Republican-controlled Senate and his malodorous reputation as a bully and a demagogue, McCarthy has never lost the allegiance of a significant segment of conservatives who either believe his poorly documented charges of massive communist infiltration of U.S. government or simply admire his “populist” willingness to attack bipartisan elites. There are also some tangible connections between his cause and Loomer’s thanks to Trump’s close relationship with McCarthy aide (and later New York superlawyer) Roy Cohn and the 47th president’s zest for conspiracy theories.
But what’s really fascinating to think about is that Loomer may be as powerful as McCarthy ever was. As Scherer notes, while she’s had her ups and downs in a relatively brief career, she’s having quite a run in 2025:
In just the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency, she successfully lobbied Trump to end Secret Service protection for Joe Biden’s children. She has pushed the president to fire six members of his National Security Council, remove three leaders at the National Security Agency, end an academic appointment at West Point, fire the director of the National Vetting Center at the Department of Homeland Security, dispatch an assistant U.S. attorney in California, and remove a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. After Trump’s intel chief stripped 37 current and former national-security officials of their security clearance Wednesday, she claimed credit for first labeling 29 of them as threats to Trump.
Loomer has exercised all this pull and become a global celebrity (with a huge social-media and podcast audience) and an adviser to the president of the United States without trudging up the political ladder like McCarthy did. McCarthy was elected to a local judgeship before serving in World War II, upsetting an incumbent U.S. senator in a GOP primary in 1946, and then winning two general elections. Loomer has twice run unsuccessfully for Congress. McCarthy built his national presence through grueling campaign work for Republicans and years of committee hearings in the Senate. Loomer just needs a well-placed tweet or quote — or a private conversation with her White House friends — to change the course of events and demonstrate her power.
The big question at the moment is whether Loomer could experience a fall from grace and power as precipitous and complete as McCarthy, who faded into political irrelevance after his censure (and then reportedly drank himself to death). By most accounts, McCarthy’s trajectory decisively changed when he began training his fire on Republicans rather than Democrats, for the obvious reason that the Eisenhower administration replaced the Truman administration when Ike took office with Joe’s active assistance. The term “deep state” didn’t exist back then, but McCarthy played on perceptions that there was a permanent bipartisan foreign-policy Establishment riddled with communists who didn’t just go away with a change of party management. As an article in the National Archives concludes, Ike was the secret assassin of McCarthy’s career:
Former President Harry S. Truman openly denounced McCarthy for three years, but his rhetorical attacks only enhanced the senator’s prestige; Ike ruined him in less than half that time.
[O]n August 31, 1953, McCarthy launched hearings into communist infiltration into the United States Army—Ike’s Army. While Eisenhower did not respond in public, it was only a matter of time. Joe McCarthy had signed his own political death warrant by assaulting the service to which the general had devoted his adult life.
Much more obviously than McCarthy, Loomer owes absolutely everything to her president, and there’s not much question she has to remain in his good graces to survive, much less thrive. Yet she has flirted with great danger in recent months by going after some fellow Trump acolytes, as Scherer notes:
She has no problem going after Republican targets. She has publicly accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay, which he denies, and called the podcaster Tucker Carlson a “fraud” and a “terrible person.” Loomer let loose on [Marjorie Taylor] Greene, claiming without evidence that she committed obscene acts in CrossFit gyms. (She did link to a Daily Mail article that had suggested, based on anonymous sources, that the congresswoman had extramarital affairs with people she knew through her gym.)
But even though she almost certainly has enemies in Trump’s inner circle who resent her influence, she keeps registering wins. Just last week, she trained her fire on an aide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggesting the aide was quietly preparing a 2028 presidential run for her boss. Loomer didn’t immediately bag her trophy but did accomplish something arguably more important: a statement from Kennedy ruling out a future presidential bid.
The incident suggests that Loomer has plans for influencing the MAGA movement and the GOP even after Trump goes back to Mar-a-Lago for good, which is precisely what she accuses some of her targets of doing:
She speaks of the White House overall as a self-dealing den of duplicity, where staff regularly conspire against the president she adores.
“Everyone is positioning themselves for a post-Trump GOP,” she told me, adding that Trump is often surprised by what she tells him about his own administration. “Every time I have these briefings, he looks at his staff and says, ‘How come you didn’t tell me this?’”
Maybe Trump truly believes Loomer has no motives beyond intense personal loyalty to him and his legacy. But Trump is justly famous for discarding anyone who begins imagining themselves indispensable. Joe McCarthy arguably elevated his anti-communist principles above loyalty to party and president and got fatally burned. Loomer would be wise to reject his example in that crucial respect.
FBI agents raided the Bethesda, Maryland, home and D.C. office of John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, early on Friday morning as part of an investigation into whether he illegally handled classified information. Bolton, who became an outspoken Trump critic after leaving his first administration, has not been detained or charged with any crimes, according to an AP source.
Federal investigators have not given any official statement on why Bolton’s home and residence were searched. “The FBI is conducting court authorized activity in the area. There is no threat to public safety. We have no further comment,” a spokesperson for the bureau said, per the Washington Post.
However, shortly before the New York Postbroke news of the raid, FBI director Kash Patel posted on X:
Attorney general Pam Bondiretweeted Patel’s post, adding, “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.” FBI deputy director Dan Bongino did the same, writing, “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”
Bolton has yet to comment on the raids. He was spotted in D.C. on Friday morning, according to the AP:
After the search at Bolton’s home started, he was spotted Friday morning standing in the lobby of the Washington building where he keeps an office and talking to two people with “FBI” visible on their vests. He left a few minutes later and appeared to have gone upstairs in the building. Agents were seen taking bags into the office building through a back entrance.
FBI agents work outside the home of John Bolton on August 22, 2025 in Bethesda, Maryland. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
While the searches were being conducted, Bolton posted a message about Trump’s handling of Russia’s war in Ukraine on X. This is typical of Bolton’s criticism of Trump’s foreign policy and may have been a scheduled post:
Bolton was George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations during the Iraq War and Donald Trump’s national security adviser from March 2018 until he was fired via Twitter in September 2019. Nine months after exiting the first Trump administration Bolton published a best-selling book criticizing the president. The president repeatedly bashed Bolton during this time, tweeting at one point that he “should be in jail”:
Shortly after the release of Bolton’s book, the Trump Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into whether Bolton unlawfully disclosed classified information in the memoir. The investigation was closed without charges in 2021, during the Biden administration.
Trump claimed on Friday morning that he was unaware of the raid, and reiterated that he considers Bolton a “low life”:
ICE-branded vehicles parked at the U.S. Capitol on August 13. Photo: Andrew Leyden/Getty Images
ICE is now flush with taxpayer cash thanks to the roughly $75 billion in additional funding the agency received from President Trump and the GOP’s new megabill, making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the most well-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country. Now, it is trying to use that money on some brand-new rides.
Government contracting documents made public this week show the agency proposed paying four companies more than $2.4 million: $2.25 million for 25 Chevrolet Tahoes from Hendrick Motorsports in North Carolina and about $174,000 for custom wrapping of Tahoes, Ford Expeditions and other vehicles by three companies, including two in the Washington region. ICE selected the companies without an open bidding process and was required to submit the documents to justify the lack of a full and open competition.
In the documents pertaining to the three vehicle-wrapping companies, the agency describes the need for the wraps as urgent and “essential for officers to provide support and a law enforcement presence in DC.” The agency also mentions “making the District of Columbia one of the safest cities in the world.”
They also want to buy some Ford Mustang GTs, Raptors, and GMC Yukon AT4s as part of a nearly $700,000 expenditure to support recruiting:
ICE wrote in the documents that the Mustangs were “an immediate request by the White House, on Thursday August 7, 2025.” The Mustangs — which are set to cost $121,450 — will aid in recruitment “by serving as a bold, high-performance symbol of innovation, strength and modern federal service,” the documents say.
DHS and ICE have already literally rolled out a few decal-wrapped ICEmobiles in D.C. and used footage of them on the streets in recruitment marketing on social media. The vehicles are emblazoned with gold ICE logos and the phrase Defend the homeland. The custom detailing also includes the words integrity,courage, and endurance on the rear bumper.
Spending millions on flashy vehicles is also sort of off-brand for ICE, since in its actual operations, the agency has become notorious for hiding its identity. Almost every time you see footage of ICE doing anything these days, it’s guys wearing full face masks and ad hoc tactical uniforms traveling around in unmarked vehicles and refusing to identify themselves.
In this sense, featuring the new ICEmobiles in a recruiting pitch is false advertising if recruits will never actually drive or ride in them. It would be more honest to slap terrifying, anonymous, and unaccountable on the bumpers.
The ICE vehicles’ color scheme and detailing also hold more than a passing resemblance to Trump’s crappy private jet:
Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images
And speaking of planes, ICE wants to spend way, way more to start its own airline, NBC News reports:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use an influx of funds to buy, own and operate its own fleet of airplanes to deport immigrants, two sources familiar with the discussions told NBC News. Former officials said that ICE owning and maintaining its own planes would be costly but could make it easier for the agency to potentially double the number of people it deports each month.
ICE uses charter planes to deport immigrants and has done so for years. The agency has typically chartered eight to 14 planes at a time for deportation flights, according to Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff from 2022 to 2023. He said that allowed the Biden administration to deport roughly 15,000 immigrants per month on charter flights.
Setting up ICE Air would cost billions:
It can cost $80 million to $400 million to buy a commercial airliner, according to aviation experts at the Pilot Institute, a company that trains pilots. Purchasing 30 passenger jets at that price range could cost $2.4 billion to $12 billion, but it’s unclear if ICE could lower the price per plane by buying a large number of them … Charter companies are also responsible for maintaining the planes and making sure they comply with Federal Aviation Administration rules. If Noem creates the first ICE air fleet, the agency would then be responsible for staffing the planes with pilots, medics and security, as well as maintaining them and ensuring they comply with aviation regulations.
It’s not clear whether this would save ICE money in the near or long term. NBC reports that according to one tracker, the agency chartered more than 1,000 charter flights through the end of July, and those flights typically cost about $25,000 per hour. And while the Trump administration would undoubtedly love to deport 30,000 people a month, it’s not at all clear that it will be able to do so, or for how long.
But even if ICE having its own airline ended up being a huge waste of taxpayer money, it’s hard to imagine Trump caring about that. He loves planes and symbolic branding opportunities almost as much as he loves the idea of turning deportation into America’s new pastime. And he’s already moving forward with the ill-advised idea of converting a jumbo jet Qatar didn’t want into the new Air Force One (which could cost $1 billion), while also trying to reopen Alcatraz (a potential waste of $2 billion). Plus, this week, he and Noem started having workers paint the southern border wall black so it would be hotter to the touch (during the day):
Another flip and flop, this time on how to ban voting by mail. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Donald Trump began this week with a bang. He posted a long screed on Truth Social attacking voting by mail and voting machines and vowed to issue an executive order banning both these frequent targets of MAGA conspiracy theories about Democratic election theft. Legal experts immediately observed that Trump has zero power to do these things, given clear constitutional provisions letting states control election administration and permitting Congress alone to regulate federal elections. The president gave a bizarre twist to this threat by citing an endorsement by Vladimir Putin of his contention that voting by mail is bad (perhaps because the Russian president thinks voting itself is bad, or at least unnecessary).
Less than a day later, however, Trump seems to have gotten the memo that this is one presidential power grab that doesn’t even begin to pass the smell test. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made it known that the new plan was to pursue legislation rather than executive action to radically restrict voting opportunities. Roll Callreports:
[Leavitt] signaled that the administration had ditched the president’s approach.
“The White House continues to work on this, and when Congress comes back to Washington I’m sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill, and also our friends in state legislatures across the country, to ensure that we’re protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people,” she said. “And I think Republicans generally and the president generally wants to make it easier for Americans to vote and harder for people to cheat in our elections.”
Asked what changed so quickly, and whether Trump had received a legal ruling from within the administration that his office lacked the authority to make such a dramatic election change, a White House spokesman merely lobbed accusations at Democrats and repeated Trump’s 2024 campaign platform on the issue.
This is famously not a White House where mistakes or even self-contradictions are ever acknowledged. But the change of strategy doesn’t alter the likely trajectory of Trump’s latest voter-suppression crusade.
Leavitt can talk about consultations with Congress as much as she wants, but the fact remains there is not even a single chance a Trump-sponsored election administration bill could survive a Democratic filibuster. Democrats themselves tried to establish national voting and election rules of a very different nature during Joe Biden’s administration, but it went nowhere for the same reason.
Her reference to state legislatures is a bit more interesting since, if he chose, Trump could lobby Republican-controlled state governments to restrict voting by mail or abolish the use of voting machines. Utah, an all-mail-ballot state, recently gave Trump a pound of flesh by banning the practice of counting mail ballots postmarked before Election Day but received afterwards, which the president attacked in an executive order he issued earlier this year. If you somehow thought Trump might hesitate to dictate to the states on such matters, his recent demands that Texas and other states steal some U.S. House seats for the GOP should have resolved that question.
As election-law expert Richard Hasen explained today in the New York Times, there are some other power grabs Trump might pursue prior to the 2026 or 2028 elections:
He has directed federal government departments to vacuum up state voter registration data and to investigate voter fraud. He has been sending federal troops into American cities, and we cannot discount the prospect of his ordering ICE and other federal agents into Philadelphia, Milwaukee or other places with large minority populations around Election Day. He might even try to use the 2017 designation of the U.S. election system as “critical infrastructure” — a designation aimed at assuring adequate federal protection of state election systems, made during the Obama administration — as an excuse to meddle with secure and safe state and county election processes.
But whatever the president chooses to do or threaten to do, the one sure thing is that his broader goal is to delegitimize any elections his party loses, just as he sought to delegitimize the 2020 presidential results. Per the Times:
Mr. Trump wants his supporters to believe that Democrats can win only by cheating. “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM,” he wrote in his Monday post. … It’s a recipe for further polarization and, as someone in Mr. Trump’s orbit told The Times, “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
Trump may flip and flop and reverse himself five times a day on both his political strategy and tactics, as he has repeatedly changed his tune on voting by mail. But his underlying war on the credibility of elections abides.
We’ve come a long way from Donald Trump routinely notifying administration officials of their termination via tweet. But working in the second Trump White House still sounds pretty unnerving. The administration just announced that Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey has been tapped to be deputy director of the FBI — which is pretty weird since Dan Bongino is already serving in that role.
Fox News Digital broke the news on Monday that Bailey will serve as co–deputy director alongside Bongino. The report included statements praising Bailey from both FBI director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“I am thrilled to welcome Andrew Bailey as co–deputy director of the FBI,” Bondi said. “He has served as a distinguished state attorney general and is a decorated war veteran, bringing expertise and dedication to service. His leadership and commitment to the country will be a tremendous asset as we work together to advance President Trump’s mission.”
The report did not clarify how the two deputy directors will divide their duties, nor did it allude to the conflict between Patel, Bondi, and Bongino over the administration’s botched release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Or that day Bongino didn’t show up to work in June, amid multiple reports that he was planning to quit because he was furious about the Epstein situation. All of which seems like it may be relevant?
Or not, if you trust Bongino’s one-word, no-exclamation-point response to this news:
The New York Timesreported that Bailey’s mysterious appointment has “bewildered many current and former F.B.I. agents, who said they had never heard of a co–deputy director.”
This strange move isn’t necessarily a dig at Bongino. It could be part of Trump’s maximum-chaos approach to governing. As the Times noted, “Mr. Trump has a tendency to appoint one person to multiple high-level positions, as well as task multiple people with the same role.”
And back in May, Bongino told Fox News that the job was taking a toll on him. So maybe the FBI put another person in the exact same role to help Bongino with his work-life balance?
Hey, it’s possible! Though considering that Trump officials once let it be known that a colleague was on the toilet when he learned he was getting canned, humiliating Bongino does seem like the likeliest explanation.
At Bloomberg Opinion, Patricia Lopez writes that “Latinos were motivated by the same concerns that drove other voters in the new Trump coalition: an economy that has eroded working-class buying power and a flood of immigrants who were feared as competitors for jobs”:
Trump shrewdly played on those fears with his “Black jobs” riff, which he later expanded to include “Hispanic jobs.” His anti-immigrant rhetoric drew a bright line between Hispanics on the one hand and migrants on the other. “They’re going to be attacking — and they already are — Black population jobs, Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too,” Trump said. “So, when you see the border, it’s not just the crime. Your jobs are being taken away, too.” Never mind data that shows the claim is untrue.
The pitch drew Latinos into a universe where many longed to be, included in the mainstream, and allowed them to participate in otherizing the new enemy — recent immigrants. Trump’s attacks also exploited tensions within the Latino population itself. Mexicans by far represent the largest and most well-established group of Latino Americans and occupy all rungs of society, from entrepreneurial billionaires on down. Puerto Ricans are American citizens by birth and some — though by no means all — resent being associated with those here illegally.
Trump gave permission for each group to look down on newer waves of immigrants that now arrive mostly from Central and South America and have proved as much a headache to Mexico as to the US.
Republicans [were] organized, funded, and ambitious in Latino neighborhoods this year, especially in South Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Democrats, meanwhile, keep prioritizing the most likely voters, in whiter, college educated suburbs. In low-turnout communities, door knocking and in-person outreach makes a huge difference.
And he explained that Latinos’ perceptions of Trump didn’t outweigh their basic economic concerns as a group that is 80 percent working class:
I’ve spoken with pro-Trump Latinos who aren’t shy about calling out his racist comments. They don’t have rose-colored goggles for the man. Still, many tend to assume his xenophobia is directed at undocumented immigrants, not them personally. Polling still find that most Latinos consider Democrats the more welcoming party. Republicans get read as racist. But Latinos vote strategically — the economy ranks as their #1 issue; racism trails far behind. And some think Democrats are also racist.
There’s another dynamic this year. In the past, the taboo for voting for Trump was intense. After Trump’s surprising success in 2020, however, the social consequences for openly supporting him are less severe. Do not underestimate how powerful this interpersonal element is.
He says that Democrats are losing Latinos in part because they are choosing not to court them:
Latino dealignment is a symptom of broader class dealignment. My argument, however, is that this transformation comes from electoral strategy as much as ideological shift. Democrats *could* win; but they’re not trying as hard as the GOP to win working class voters.
Bloomberg Opinion’s Patricia Lopez also concluded that Democrats are going to have take long hard look at how to appeal to this enormous and diverse group of voters:
Ronald Reagan used to joke that Latinos were Republicans, “they just don’t know it yet.” Democrats have long sought to make Latinos part of their coalition — fighting for Dreamers, a path to citizenship, and better wages and working conditions.
But they may have lost a step in recognizing that Latinos are no more a monolith than Black voters or any other identity group. The Latino red shift could be a fluke or a permanent realignment. But expect the priorities of this multi-faceted community to come into a much higher profile as the two parties battle over them.
Equis Research’s Stephanie Valencia and Carlos Odio, meanwhile, are pushing back on the idea that Latinos voters can be blamed for Trump’s victory, as his swing-state wins and the shift of the Latino vote are in fact two distinct stories:
The magnitude of the gains Trump made in places like New York, New Jersey, and Texas — states that don’t decide the presidential race – were surprising and point to deeper discontent and broader trends.
But the support Trump received among Latinos in the battleground states should not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention. Those shifts were present in polling throughout the cycle and since the early days of the Biden presidency. Harris ultimately had the support she needed with Latinos to win, if all else held according to plan. Yes, Trump did make big gains with Latinos, but those gains are not what decided his victory. What happened in this election is larger than Latinos – Trump’s win came from a broader erosion of support in key battleground states. Latinos in the battleground states are a critical part of winning but they do not alone determine the outcome.
They also argue that Trump “Trump should not misread any gains in Latino votes as support for his full agenda — in fact quite the opposite”:
The Latinos who did move to Trump were clear: they want him to bring down prices. They rejected Project 2025, and told us repeatedly in focus groups and polling that they didn’t believe he would do any of the things his opponents said he would, from banning abortion to repealing Obamacare to deporting long-term immigrants like Dreamers. They voted for Trump because they believed he would prioritize the economy over all else, just as they did in voting for him.
UCLA political psychologist Efrén Pérez adds that based on his research, Latinos and other people of color are simply becoming more polarized, just like everybody else already is:
What I think we’re seeing is polarization catching up to people of colr. We get two parties and two choices and all of the internal heterogeneity of various people of color must be channeled and expressed through these two (!) parties. Both parties currently “own” different identities. Eg, Democrats are the party of people of color while Republicans are the party of “real” Americans. Many people of color have clear identity priorities. Among Asian and Latino individuals, about 27 percent of them value their American identity over their racial identity.
Part of what is happening with party identity among these groups is that they are sorting into the “correct” party that they see reflecting how they view themselves.
Musk at his America PAC event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on October 26. Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Marshall Miller has been canvassing in the crucial and vote-rich regions of eastern Pennsylvania for years. A leader in the local Democratic Party in his hometown of Lancaster, Miller is used to crossing paths with his Republican opponents while out knocking doors. Both sides keep it polite — maintaining a respectful distance if they both happen to arrive at the same house at the same time.
This year, though, it has been lonelier on the sidewalks of the Keystone State. Miller says that there has been scarcely a Republican door knocker in sight lately and that remains true with just hours to go before the polls close.
“Honestly, it feels kind of bizarre,” Miller said when he was on his way to Delaware County for another afternoon of canvassing. “Usually, I would see them and nod or say ‘hi’ or something, but I have knocked on a fair number of doors at this point and haven’t seen them around at all.”
The lack of evidence of a Republican ground operation in Pennsylvania and in many of the swing states comes as the Trump campaign has attempted a novel approach to its get-out-the-vote strategy: relying almost entirely on America PAC, a super-PAC that is largely funded by Elon Musk, who has donated more than $120 million to elect Donald Trump this year.
That effort has been plagued by a seemingly endless series of stories attesting to its mismanagement and lack of focus. Wiredreported that canvassers in Michigan affiliated with America PAC were hired from out of state without being told their job was to knock on doors on behalf of Trump; once they arrived, they would be driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van, where they were told that unless they met their canvassing quotas, they would have to pay for their own lodgings and airfare without compensation for their work.
Last month, The Guardianreported that a quarter of the door-knocks Musk’s canvassers said they had completed were flagged by an auditor as fraudulent, as the PAC’s foot soldiers were found to be not near the location of the homes they were supposed to have visited; one was even logging door-knocks while sitting at a nearby restaurant. America PAC has been run by a political-consulting firm managed by Phil Cox, a prominent Republican operative who was involved in a similar super-PAC-run canvassing effort on behalf of Florida governor Ron DeSantis in the Republican primaries before DeSantis flamed out in the Iowa caucuses. After Cox was brought in over the summer, the super-PAC terminated its relationship with the vendors who had been working with the PAC previously and brought in vendors that are affiliated with Cox.
“I think it is just an absolute joke,” said one former DeSantis campaign official. “There is so much dysfunction to it. There are like three new articles every day on how awful it is, and it seems like just a cash cow for the people that are running it. If Trump wins, it won’t be because of anything these guys are doing.”
In October, Musk hijacked the X handle @America from its previous owner in order to promote his latest project. Pinned to the top of @America’s profile, just below its mission statement (“PAC Founded by @ElonMusk to support candidates who champion Secure Borders, Sensible Spending, Safe Cities, Fair Justice System, Free Speech and Self-Protection”), are options to submit an application to be a paid canvasser at $29 to $30 an hour. Experienced canvassers, who are usually volunteers, say that is a much higher wage than usual for the work.
Those are not the only ways that Musk has been willing to spend his money. In October, he announced he would give $47 to everyone who convinced even one registered swing-state voter to sign a petition saying they supported the First and Second Amendment to the Constitution. The project was a way both to get potential voters to register without violating the federal law that forbids paying people to register outright and to identify potential Trump voters. A few weeks later, Musk upped the giveaway to $100 for voters in Pennsylvania.
Then Musk went even further, announcing that he would award $1 million every day to one random petition-signer. This caught the attention of Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner, who sued, arguing that it amounted to running an illegal lottery. Musk’s lawyers pushed to have the case moved to federal court, and on Thursday, a federal judge put the case on hold before remanding it back to state court a day later.
While canvassing operations tend to be pretty open about their work, since they are often volunteer-driven and involve face-to-face communication out in the open, America PAC has been buttoned up about its approach. The group has no real physical presence in the communities in which it operates, and a spokesperson would only say that it’s pushing mail, text messages, digital outreach, and door-to-door canvassing in its effort to elect Trump. The spokesperson admitted that the secrecy was unusual but added, “You pointing that out is not going to change our approach.”
Musk’s initial foray into electioneering may have been chaotic, but high-ranking Republican operatives and Trump campaign officials say that his utility to them has been significant nonetheless. It has been just over two years since Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, and in that time, a social-media site known for being the meeting space for liberals and the media and a place where elite narratives could take hold has taken on a more right-wing character, while still remaining the digital campfire for beltway journalists and the people they cover.
“He is definitely trying to have an impact on the election; there is no doubt about that,” said Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic operative who is building his own social network, called Sez Us, to act as a counter to X. “He just said that CNN should be called ‘the Disinformation News Network’ and he has 200 million followers. How could that not have an effect?”
Trippi pointed out not only that Musk has enormous personal reach, which he uses to amplify positive messages about Trump and spread negative ones (including some falsehoods) about Democrats — but also that the X platform itself now compounds those effects. Anyone who clicks on the algorithmically controlled “For You” tab on the site is likely to see multiple posts from Musk himself, accompanied by viral posts that skew Trumpian (for instance, clips depicting a country overrun by migrants and criminals).
Trump-campaign officials have looked on with amazement as messages that they struggled to call attention to, such as J.D. Vance’s visit to the border, suddenly go megaviral online thanks to Musk’s boost. The help is even more appreciated, they say, since under the previous regime of the website, many conservatives felt that their voices were being censored or suppressed.
“It’s amazing,” said one Republican operative close to Trump. “He’s engaging in politics in a way that no one in that kind of position has really done before, and he is hitting all of the pro-Trump and anti-Kamala notes you could ask for and making things go viral left and right. It’s not even that he is the owner of the site; it’s the fact that he is engaging in a way he never did. Twitter, or X, or whatever you call it, is still the place where media narratives are created on both sides of the aisle. Twelve percent of the U.S. population is on Twitter, and that includes top Republican and Democratic operatives.”
Musk has been holding town halls across Pennsylvania that, if nothing else, earn the campaign publicity on local-news outlets, which campaign officials say counts for far more than coverage on cable TV and in the national press. When Musk appeared at a town hall in the central Pennsylvania city of Lancaster last week, the headline for the story on the local CBS News affiliate read, “’Harris Is a Puppet’: Elon Musk Returns to Pa. for Town Hall, Promotes Early Voting.” A few days earlier, a local TV affiliate in Harrisburg quoted Musk telling town-hall attendees that “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending” were his reasons for supporting Trump. “To protect the Constitution, especially the right to free speech. These are all things that seem very obvious and frankly normal and they’re in severe danger if the ‘Kamala machine’ wins,” Musk continued, according to the story on ABC27News in Harrisburg.
One Trump campaign official described Musk as being like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate who was a relentless promotor of Trump in 2020 — except that Musk is someone “with real money.”
“We just stand back and marvel. He is moving the needle for us with the young and unmotivated male vote that we need in a state like Pennsylvania.” said this official. “Politics is a game of inches. Elon brings a foot.”
