Donald Trump has sweeping plans for a second administration. Here’s what he’s proposed

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Trump failed to stop inflation. Now Republicans may pay the price in the midterm elections

President Donald Trump would prefer that voters not worry about inflation. But it's hard for them to ignore. Read More.

Trump administration asks Washington to set aside ballots from 400 voters it says may be noncitizens

The Trump administration on Monday asked Washington state to set aside any ballots received from more than 400 people it suspects registered to vote without U.S. citizenship. Read More.   US told Venezuelan authorities that opposition leader Machado should be allowed to return Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that the Trump administration told Venezuela’s interim authorities “weeks and weeks ago” that opposition leader María Corina Machado should be allowed to return as the country moves ahead with preparing for elections next year. Read More. Trump heads to Mississippi for a midterm rally, and the Democrat he wants defeated is going, too President Donald Trump heads Monday to Mississippi, as he continues a closing midterm campaign blitz that highlights Republicans' challenges ahead of an election that could drastically shift power in Washington and statehouses across the country. Read More.

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A New Low

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They say that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but President Trump and his allies have found a new low: open bigotry against Muslims.

The bar for what can shock has been raised steadily over the past decade, but even by Trump-era standards, remarks that the president made yesterday at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, are astonishing: a straightforward assertion that a Muslim candidate for office is a terrorist by virtue of his faith.

Trump was campaigning for Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, when he attacked Rogers’s opponent, the Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. “I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” Trump said. “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.” Trump also said that “anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane.” He added that if elected, El-Sayed “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.” (In fact, the only time that members of Congress have had to pass through metal detectors in the Capitol was on the House side, as a security precaution after Trump supporters sacked it on January 6, 2021.)

To be clear: El-Sayed has disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood, and no one has produced any evidence that he has ties to the group. Neither has anyone produced any evidence that El-Sayed has ties to any jihadists or is one himself. If he did, the Justice Department would presumably be prosecuting him—it certainly hasn’t shied away from politicized cases under Trump.

The president and anyone else are free to critique El-Sayed’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or any other policy matter, but that’s not what this is. Asking a candidate to disavow a foreign political group that has no American arm is a nonsensical and prejudiced thing to do, but Republicans have been trying hard in the past couple of weeks to draw some connection between El-Sayed and the group, despite a lack of evidence. (They have been assisted by allies in the press, including Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, whose staffers complained to Semafor that she is disproportionately focused on candidates such as El-Sayed because of her own views on Israel. CBS News called the report “baseless.”) Perhaps this is because they believe “Muslim Brotherhood” sounds shadowy and scary to voters. The new tack is also silly because the GOP previously spent months trying to connect El-Sayed to the Democratic Socialists of America, another group that he says he is not a member of. Historically, the Brotherhood, an Islamist organization, has typically clashed with socialists in the Muslim world.

Trump’s idea of what a senator should be is an older white man. That’s not a guess—it’s what he said about Rogers, the Republican candidate. “I call him apple pie,” Trump said. “He’s like, perfect, this guy. He’s like central casting. He’s what your state is all about.” As I’ve written in the past, it’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it. Trump has also made light of El-Sayed’s full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, mocking the prevalence of Muhammad in Muslim names. (The president’s own middle name is John.)

“Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, their whole campaign, Mike Rogers’s whole campaign, is to point at me and my name and my faith,” El-Sayed said in response at a rally yesterday evening. “But my name and my faith are not the reason you can’t afford your gas. My name and my faith are not the reason you can’t afford your groceries. My name and my faith are not the reason you can’t see a doctor.”

Trump’s latest remarks about El-Sayed are of a piece with a series of racist and Islamophobic remarks. Two frequent targets of late are Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, and the Somali community in Minnesota. He has called Omar “garbage” and said that Somalia is “filthy, dirty, disgusting, dirty.” He has labeled Somalis “low-IQ” but also complained that they are highly effective grifters.

Politicians allied with Trump are also getting in on the hate. Earlier this year, I wrote about a spree of bigoted remarks by GOP members of Congress. More recently, Representative Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican, said that Somali Americans should assimilate or “go the hell back.” (He added that he wasn’t afraid of being called an Islamophobe.) And Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is in a tough reelection race, falsely claimed that his Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, “supports Sharia law” because she received an endorsement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. You don’t have to think too hard to guess why CAIR opted to back someone running against Abbott.

With this kind of talk, it’s no wonder that Muslim voters who backed Trump in 2024, largely out of frustration with the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel, are now angry and disillusioned, as The New York Times reports. (Anyone is entitled to cast a protest vote, but given Trump’s long record of anti-Muslim bigotry, those who lined up behind Trump shouldn’t be surprised.)

Islamophobic rhetoric deserves condemnation on its own terms, but the attacks don’t just affect El-Sayed, Omar, or even Muslim communities in the United States. During the same speech, Trump—who has previously said that Jewish Democrats are “disloyal to Jewish people”—called for ostracizing any Jewish Michiganders who vote for El-Sayed. “Any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves,” he said. “You should never speak to them again.” Once bigotry against one community enters the mainstream, it tends to spread quickly to other groups.

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🏈 Scoop: Trump enlists Texas football stars

Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

President Trump will campaign with three football stars in Texas on Tuesday, leaning into America's favorite sport as Republicans scramble to turn out voters in the final week before the midterms, Axios' Alex Isenstadt has learned. Former college football stars Johnny Manziel and Colt McCoy, along with two-time Super Bowl champion Danny Amendola, will join Trump for campaign appearances in Lubbock and Corpus Christi. Amendola starred at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Manziel won the Heisman Trophy at Texas A&M, and McCoy was a standout quarterback at the University of Texas. 🎨 The big picture: Trump has made football a recurring feature of his campaign stops in recent weeks. Trump attended the Texas-Tennessee game in September and planned to attend the Georgia-Alabama showdown earlier this month before canceling because of a hurricane. Former NFL coach Jon Gruden joined Trump at an Ohio rally this month, while former Georgia and NFL star Todd Gurley accompanied the president on a stop in Georgia. Marc Caputo contributed reporting.

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🇻🇪 Rubio warns Venezuela

A supporter of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado waves a Venezuelan flag on top of a truck after her arrival in Caracas on Sunday. Photo: Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images A day after Venezuela's exiled opposition leader returned to Caracas with great fanfare, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a veiled warning against interfering with the country's fragile democratic transition pushed by the Trump administration, Axios' Marc Caputo writes. "You're not going to street-protest your way into a democracy," Rubio told reporters without explicitly mentioning Maria Corina Machado. Why it matters: Machado's demands for elections next year — and her criticism of a massive U.S. oil deal struck with the current Caracas regime — have put administration officials on edge after her surprise return. "Rubio is on a political edge," said a White House source familiar with his thinking. "Venezuela is the top foreign policy achievement of this administration, and if the progress we made gets undone and Machado is a spoiler, nobody wins." Keep reading.

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Grand jury refuses to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, AP sources say The Justice Department on Tuesday failed to secure a grand jury indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson who provided dramatic but disputed testimony against President Donald Trump before a House committee investigating Jan. 6, according to two people familiar with the matter. Read more.

Why this matters: It’s the latest setback in the Justice Department’s efforts to persuade grand jurors in the nation's capital to bring politically sensitive cases, that have surged in the run-up to the midterms. They include a new attempt to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and a search by federal agents of the home of outspoken Trump critic and Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Hutchinson declined to comment through her lawyer on Tuesday.   It's highly unusual for grand juries to decline to return indictments, but the Justice Department under Trump has been rebuked by citizens in the nation's capital in a number of high-profile cases.

RELATED COVERAGE ➤ Federal judge rules top US prosecutor in Los Angeles isn’t legally serving US military says 5 were killed by a strike on an alleged drug boat in the eastern Pacific Trump says he’s ending restrictions on climate-warming methane from oil drilling Supreme Court won’t intervene to allow judges to pause some deportation proceedings FACT FOCUS: Kennedy’s claim that Arabs ‘don’t produce science’ meets a Nobel Prize reality check Prominent Georgia Republican gets 15 years in prison after pleading guilty in Ponzi scheme

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Judge orders Trump to sit for a deposition in his defamation lawsuit against the BBC by Dec. 11

MIAMI (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump to sit for a deposition in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC by Dec. 11.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-bbc-media-defamation-0a26fa60b265f55a9bcf7ed88cfacab8?

Appeals court declines to block California from counting 20,000 disputed ballots

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An appeals court on Monday declined to rule on whether California elections officials can count roughly 20,000 ballots that the Justice Department alleges likely belong to noncitizen voters.

https://apnews.com/article/california-noncitizen-voting-justice-department-lawsuit-ed14390afb8af8fde1c2d0f6a90a0761?

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Trick or Trust

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For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president is seeking to wield the force of the state to secure an electoral victory for his party. The Trump administration has attempted to undermine the widespread use of mail-in voting; demanded that states hand over voter rolls; threatened to prosecute state and local election officials; refused to rule out the idea of deploying troops or federal agents to polling places; and publicized the dramatic arrests of small numbers of people accused of voting or registering to vote as noncitizens. Many of these efforts have made little headway—either because of the administration’s incompetence, the stubborn lack of factual evidence behind President Trump’s claims of voter fraud, the federal government’s lack of legal authority, or the refusal of courts to go along with Trump’s plans.

But Trump may have a different problem on his hands. Polls show Trump’s approval falling to all-time lows in the weeks before Election Day; the percent of voters happy with his performance has now sunk into the 30s. Democrats, meanwhile, appear likely to retake control of the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate, which last year seemed well out of reach. The polls could be wrong—and high-profile-polling misses of the Trump era are hard to forget. But if the polling is right, the GOP may be in for what George W. Bush, after a disastrous 2006 midterm, ruefully termed a “thumping.” And a thumping, as opposed to a narrower Democratic victory, could render most efforts to suppress turnout irrelevant, and make it far more difficult to implement any more dramatic effort to rig the results.

To Trump’s endless frustration, elections in America are organized at the state and local level, with little role for the federal government. In a typical midterm year, almost 470 congressional seats are up for grabs across 50 different states. Though a small number of those races are actually competitive, tinkering with the outcome of the votes would still require meddling with a number of different elections, all run differently, in different jurisdictions, under different laws. A strong night for the Democratic Party would make conjuring an ersatz House majority hard for the same reason that a losing sports team is less able to cheat its way to a victory in a blowout. (Even on a very strong night for the Democrats, the Senate may still be quite a close call.)

Tight margins, by contrast, can make an election more vulnerable to efforts to undo the voters’ will. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election relied in significant part on tight margins in some swing states, sometimes with only 10,000 or 20,000 votes deciding the winner. In Georgia, the president famously pushed Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to make up his deficit against Joe Biden. As described by both the House January 6 committee’s report and Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump, Trump and his allies used close tallies in swing states, together with the slow counting of mail-in ballots, to engineer doubts over election results and provide Republican members of Congress with the tools to delay the formal counting of the electoral vote on January 6. The attack on the Capitol followed.

The memory of January 6, and the entrenchment of the election-denier movement since 2020, has led to speculation—both anxious and enthused—about the possibility of a comparable attack on election results in 2026. If, once most of the results are in, Democrats seem set to eke out a House majority by just a few seats, perhaps committed Trump allies in positions of power could make trouble in a handful of the closest districts. A local election commissioner, say, could refuse to sign off on a Democrat’s narrow victory, or the Justice Department could execute a warrant to seize ballots and thus delay or upend the counting of votes. This could create chaos on January 3, when the new House gathers for the first time: What happens if the contested seats are enough to deny the should-be-majority party the votes it needs to select a new speaker and take control of the chamber? Although this isn’t a foolproof trick for stealing control of the House, such a play could make things very precarious very quickly.

But the bigger the majority secured by Democrats, the more difficult it would be for Trump to shave that majority down—the more clerks to convince, warrants to secure, and court rulings to dodge, all over the country. “If there is a House majority in either direction that is 20, 30 seats, I think the likelihood of an attempt to engage in some kind of shenanigans around January 3 is way less than if the majority is two or three seats,” Jonathan Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center commented recently on a preelection panel convened at UCLA’s law school.

Other tricks are also less effective when the vote swings heavily in one direction. For example, Trump’s unprecedented push for explicitly partisan off-cycle redistricting may net only a few extra GOP seats rather than the double-digit gains Democratic strategists had once feared.

Political constraints matter too. Any scheme to steal the House for the GOP would depend on the willingness of congressional Republicans to vote in lockstep, with no defectors—something that the current fractious House Republican caucus can barely manage. Already, though, Republicans spooked by Trump’s bad poll numbers have begun distancing themselves from him on the campaign trail as they fight to hold on to their seats. Over the summer, Republican politicians and MAGA-friendly media outlets responded coolly to a rambling address by the president casting doubt on election integrity. If the GOP loses the House, how many Republicans concerned about their own political careers would be actually inclined to adopt the fringe message of an ever more unpopular lame-duck president? (Trump has been notably quiet recently about the possibility of running for an unconstitutional third term.)    

Trump will be hard-pressed to fight against “a clear loss, coupled with the expectation of a clear loss,” Bob Bauer told me. Bauer—a longtime Democratic lawyer who played a central role in the Biden campaign’s fight against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—now focuses on bipartisan election-integrity work, alongside Ben Ginsberg, an election lawyer known for his past work representing the Republican Party. In 2020, Bauer said, the additional days required for the presidential race to be called after the polls closed helped fuel Trump’s claims of fraud. But now, broad public dissatisfaction has aligned with dismal polling for the GOP and a growing anticipation among both politicians and the press that Republicans will do poorly. “It would be very difficult in these circumstances, if things turn out that the Democrats do well, for him to suddenly announce that he was denied his landslide by vote rigging,” Bauer told me.

Just because such a scheme would be implausible does not, of course, mean that Trump won’t try it. Last week, the Justice Department filed a bizarre lawsuit seeking to preemptively block Alaska from certifying the results of its Senate race—but only if Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses. (“The legal argument is one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen,” wrote the law professor Derek Muller in an analysis of the case.) DOJ also continues to pursue litigation seeking to force California to set aside mail-in ballots to voters whom the federal government claims to have identified as noncitizens. These cases are sloppy, tardy, and almost certainly doomed. But they do have the advantage of helping Trump and his allies build a narrative about the courts blocking Trump’s efforts to ensure a fair election. Likewise, if a Trump-aligned rogue local election official tried to block a Democratic candidate’s victory, whatever he or she concocted as reasoning could provide fuel for election-fraud rumors on the far right, even if the effort—as it likely would—ultimately failed.

In a wave election, some races will still be close. They may just be in different states or districts—mostly, more Republican ones—than in a year with more typical political geography. House seats in deep-red areas across the country may be newly up for grabs. In the Senate, races in Texas and Alaska stand out as potential flash points. “Any close race in the Senate is going to be hotly, hotly contested,” Bauer told me. He pointed to the bitter fight between the Democrat Al Franken and the Republican Norm Coleman over the 2008 Senate election in Minnesota, which took months to resolve and ended with the courts upholding Franken’s 312-vote victory.

In the final weeks before the midterms, election experts have seemed notably calmer than some of the the anxious rhetoric around Trump’s potential subversion of the vote might suggest. Eight experts interviewed by The New York Times (including Bauer) voiced worries about possible upheaval but overall confidence that officials are prepared to protect the integrity of the elections. The nonprofit publication Votebeat likewise surveyed 31 authorities on election administration and found the group to be wary but “cautiously optimistic” that the midterms will go smoothly. If the elections pass without serious disruption, a hefty margin of victory for the Democratic Party could be partly why. But the fact that such a margin may be needed to avoid chaos is itself sobering. In a healthy democracy, the opposition party should not have to win by enormous numbers to ensure victory, and voters should be able to trust that even a close election will be free and fair.

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