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Margaret Sullivan: Grading the Media’s Coverage of the Election

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2026 //
3

Margaret Sullivan is a super-journalist who previously served as ombudsman for The New York Times. She is dedicated to fearless truth-telling, and she gets very cross when journalists go wish-washy and presents”both sides” while ignoring facts, evidence and truth.

Sullivan writes a blog on Substack called “American Crisis: Can Journalism Save Democracy?” She has no paywall and invites readers to subscribe if they are able. This column was published on October 14. I missed it. It remains highly pertinent.

She writes:

The midterm elections are three weeks away, as I write this post, and I’ll remind you of what historian Timothy Snyder aptly said several weeks ago: “We are now two months from the American midterm elections, probably the most consequential since the eighteenth century. Given that the presidency is held by an oligarch who wishes to bring our republic to an end, a victory of the opposition is a prerequisite for the maintenance of the rule of law and anything resembling political democracy.”

Because they are so consequential, I’ve been pushing here, on American Crisis, for news coverage that concentrates less on the horserace and the polls and the prediction markets, and more on the importance of the midterms to our democracy.

Readers, there is precious little of that latter kind of coverage in mainstream media. That’s more than disappointing. Instead, there’s a broad range of stories that either a) really don’t get it and indulge in false equivalency; or b) make a few gestures at the importance of the elections but don’t shout the consequences from the rooftops.

Here’s a sampling of what I saw, with some grades. Let me know if you agree and if you think the coverage is better than I’m giving the media credit for. Please point out anything you found excellent and I’ll be happy to spread the word. 

First, an article and podcast rife with some of the worst sins of the current media era — false equivalence, sane-washing and soft-pedaling language. This was on the Times opinion site, titled “How Worried Should We Be About the Midterm Elections?” It’s led by Sarah Isgur, whose background includes posts in the first Trump administration, specifically the Justice Department, in conversation with NYU law professor Richard Pildes. (In the podcast itself, she refers to herself as a former Republican operative and Pildes expresses surprised interest in this. This was not exactly a state secret.) You can read the transcript here or listen to the conversation, but here’s the kind of thing you’ll run across; this from Isgur: “You have the left talking about voter suppression. You have the right talking about voter fraud.” 

To clear away the thick smoke of false equivalence, you need to go to the top reader comments, where there’s a lot more straight talk. (I love reader comments!) 

To wit: “I felt like I was going crazy listening to today’s podcast. Am I the only one who remembers Jan. 6? Hang Mike Pence?…You guys spend way too much of your energy (framing) mistrust of elections as some sort of both-sides issue when it is a matter of public record that a significant and dominant faction of the Republican Party tried to overturn the 2020 election. There is no Democratic equivalent.” Or this: “Should we be worried about midterm elections? No, we should be worried (about) Trump and Republicans cancelling them or disallowing the results.”

I give this podcast a generous D. 

At the other end of the spectrum, an A to a ProPublica piece that goes to the heart of what we SHOULD be worrying about related to the midterms. “Inside Trump’s Effort to ‘Take Over’ the Midterm Elections.” The reporting highlights are summarized at the beginning of the April piece, a device I appreciated. They are three: 

  • Safeguards Destroyed, about how Trump has systematically demolished the federal guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 election.
  • Changing of Guard, about how career staff have been replaced by employees from the election denial movement.
  • Political Interference, about how once-fringe players have access to vast power within the voting systems. 

Everything about this is excellent. Check it out here.

And another A to the New York Times’s Theodore Schleifer, who revealed the detailsabout Elon Musk’s $276 million funding of midterm races, “trying to save Republicans’ Senate majority with some of the largest donations in American political history.” [Diane notes: Musk’s funding for Republicans is now close to $500 million.] And again, I can’t resist quoting the top comment: “This is exactly why Democrats should make repealing Citizens United one of their first priorities (because it) has effectively silenced the voices of the American electorate to the point that now only corporations have a seat at the table.”

Then, there’s a lot in between. This NBC News piece, described as “breaking down what matters most to voters before the 2026 elections,” is overall very good, though heavily dependent on a network poll. But the way Sahil Kapur explores and explains the data is direct, informative and in the public interest. I don’t love poll-based reporting but still: Solid B.

The Guardian (where I write a media and politics column) had a good piece interviewing voters across the political spectrum about what issues matter to them. I am a bit weary of hearing from people like the self-described Maga Republican voter, Sharon Anderson of Tennessee, who proclaims that while she would like to see the war with Iran end, “the person that’s able to end this conflict is in leadership today.” She means Trump, who she says has also caused America to be more respected on the world stage. But many of the answers, especially those from independents, are interesting and the piece is issues-oriented. I give it a B.

Similar in many ways is a Washington Post piece reported out of Youngstown, Ohio at a Trump rally by a fine reporter, Cat Zakrzewski, who observes that “entire sections of the Covelli Centre arena and upper levels sat mostly empty” and quotes local people saying they are disillusioned with Trump. (But, of course, not many sound like they’re ready to cross the aisle when voting; that, apparently, is a bridge too far.) 

I thought the piece was poorly served by its headline, “In Ohio, some Trump voters question whether he’s still fighting for them.” (Was he ever really fighting for the working people of Ohio? Again, from the comments: “Trump was never fighting for you, he just needed your votes, geniuses.”) I wish stories like this would ask people what it would take to get them to vote their disappointment. But overall, factoring in the bad headline, but appreciative of the on-the-scene reporting: B-minus. Read it here with a gift link.

Given Jay Rosen’s excellent guideline for better politics coverage — “not the odds, but the stakes” — I thought the name of a new podcast from Kara Swisher and Hillary Clinton was on target: “High Stakes.” It’ll be interesting to see what they do in the days ahead. Here’s what Clinton had to say in advance: “I don’t think the stakes for the country and the world could be any higher. If we don’t reverse this chaos and corruption and cruelty that is being visited upon us by this administration, we won’t recognize our country.” 

Please let me know what media coverage you are seeing that gets that point — and Timothy Snyder’s point — across in clear, direct terms

Categories Democracy, Media, Ethics, Lies, Hypocrisy

Texas Public Schools Are Under Attack: Consider the Case of Austin

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2026 //
1

A journalist in Texas wrote the following. He/she lives in Austin and requested anonymity to avoid reprisals. I have double-checked the information shared. It is accurate.

The journalist describes Governor Greg Abbott’s tactic to destroy public education: state takeovers. This allows the state to dismiss the locally elected school board and replace it with people loyal to Governor Abbott and State Superintendent Mike Morath, a non-educator picked by Abbott. After the state takeover, teachers leave, enrollment declines..public schools being to the state, not to the district.

The journalist wrote the following to me:

Texas public schools are under attack. And no Texas district is being attacked on as many fronts as Austin ISD.

 State policies and targeted investigations are taking a toll, pulling time, energy, and funds from the real work of supporting Austin’s students, teachers, and campus communities. The district is facing a long list of challenges, all created or exacerbated by many years of anti-public school policies from state leaders. Students and teachers feel the impact on campuses every day. Families are leaving the district. Budgets are becoming tighter each year. Charters and vouchers are siphoning students from public schools and concentrating need at many campuses. And despite this community’s deep belief in engaging education, teaching is increasingly focused on testing – the near-inevitable result of a punitive high-stakes testing environment.

 Austin is sometimes described as the blueberry in the tomato soup – the brightest blue community in what has long been a deeply red state. That makes the district a favorite target for state leaders, who routinely attack it to score political points.Students, teachers, families, and the city are suffering as those attacks weaken a district in that should be among the strongest urban districts in the country.

 The community shows up for Austin ISD schools, and people across the economic spectrum continue to choose Austin ISD schools, which educate a mix of students who are diverse in every way. About half come from families classified as having economic disadvantage and half do not. About half are Hispanic, almost a third are emergent bilingual, and nearly one in ten are immigrants from all over the world.

 Austin ISD’s school board looks a lot like the city itself – racially and economically diverse, highly educated, and politically progressive. All were elected with strong support from their local union and their local communities. All serve as volunteers in a role that demands many hours and invites public critique along with the joy. All have seen the impact of state policies on Texas public schools. Many are longtime public education advocates. And all have become far too familiar withthe power the Texas Education Agency holds over Texas districts.

 In Texas, state takeovers are becoming a go-to remedy. Houston ISD was the first big district to fall, in 2023. Then, last year, the pace escalated. A single school with five F ratings in a row can trigger a takeover. Four more districts are now under state control, including Fort Worth ISD – another of the state’s largest urban districts. When the 2026-27 school year began, some 250,000 Texas students walked into classrooms that are now under state control.

 It’s an unprecedented experiment, and an aggressive exercise of state power over local communities. Now Austin ISD – rated a B under the state’s narrow accountability system – is the latest Texas district at risk of state takeover. And that is just the biggest threat among many, many others.

 Here’s a short list of challenges Austin ISD is facing right now:

 

• Investigation of student walkouts

State leaders have targeted Austin ISD for a special investigation after students at many campuses walked out to protest ICE. In a community as diverse as Austin, issues involving immigration are felt deeply and personally. Their protests were part of a student movement across the state and the country in late January. Yet Governor Greg Abbot and Attorney General Ken Paxton have focused special attention on Austin ISD, with an investigation that still has not been completed. The Texas Education Agency has warned that walkouts could lead to a state takeover.

 

• Investigation of which bathroom a single student has used

Attorney General Paxton has also targeted Austin ISD for alleged violations of the state’s “bathroom bill,” which requires people at sites including public schools to use the bathroom that matches their sex at birth. The bill depends on people reporting districts for alleged violations – something that happened two times when someone complained about the bathroom a single transgender student was using at an Austin ISD high school, which was followed by a complaint at the district’s performing arts center. The law holds the district accountable, allowing fines of up to $5000 a day for documented violations. But the law also allows the full weight of the state to be weaponized against individual students – children in public schools.

 

• Funding crisis

For years, public education funding has failed to keep up with inflation or a long and growing list of mandates from the state. Texas consistently ranks in the bottom ten states in per-student funding. Yet schools must also pay for expensive security mandates, serve students who are emergent bilingual or who receive special education services despite funding that leaves immense gaps, and follow many other state demands that are neither optional nor funded. Across the state, dozens of schools have closed, class sizes are growing, programs and student supports are being cut, and teachers are quitting or taking second jobs. Texas offers no funding for many things it simply does not require, including school nurses and school librarians. Transportation is funded at a fraction of the actual cost to districts. In Austin ISD, the 2026-27 budget included about $205 million in deeply painful cuts. The district closed eleven campuses. They are selling property to help plug the holes. And still funding is not keeping up with costs. That crisis has been deepened by the passage of a $1 billion statewide voucher after many years of successful resistance by the Texas Legislature. Passage was only possible after the sitting governor primaried legislators who voted against vouchers, then had President Trump call lawmakers the morning of the vote. The cost is expected to double this year.

 

• State comptroller audit

At a campaign stop in El Paso in August, Governor Greg Abbott asked the Texas Comptroller to investigate the use of taxpayer money at up to four Texas school districts. The goal, according to the Governor, was to prevent funds from “being absorbed by central office growth, administrative bloat, consultants, and the web of noninstructional bureaucracy.” News reports say districts are being asked for data far beyond what an audit focused on the use of funds would require. The list includes lists of library books, demands for documents related to DEI, scrutiny of foreign workers, and information about Social Security numbers that advocates fear is an attempt to understand how many students may be undocumented.

 

• Investigation of Pride Week celebration

Austin ISD has a long history of celebrating Pride Week. Since 2014, that meant supporting activities that included flying Pride flags at district facilities, participating as a district in the community’s Pride Parade, offering age-appropriate activities focused on respect for other people, and supporting campuses that chose to host their own after-school events for families. Staff and families have often said that they have chosen the district because of AISD’s welcoming climate. And the district continued to celebrate Pride Week – along with Juneteenth, Cesar Chavez Day, and other important community celebrations – even after trustees received a death threat targeting the parade. Since 2024, AISD’s Pride Week celebrations have grown smaller and smaller, and less and less visible. In 2026, the district chose not to participate in the community’s parade, inviting PTA leaders to step into the district’s place. As a result, the parade shrank from dozens of people with district support to just a handful. And still, in April, the Texas Education Agency began an investigation into Austin ISD for Pride Week. That investigation was launched in response to a complaint not from within the community, but from a conservative member of the State Board of Education who represents a district in Fort Worth, about 200 miles away. On social media, he called for defunding the district and for a criminal investigation of the superintendent. He also shared concerns that if the practice is not stopped in Austin ISD, it will expand to other communities in the state.

 This is not normal, even in Texas, except for Austin ISD. Each investigation or audit takes precious resources that no Texas district has to spare. Time and funds are diverted from the work that matters most – of educating students, supporting teachers, and inspiring a lifelong love of learning that prepares Austin’s students for the futures they deserve. 

 It does not have to be this way. And it’s both painful and promising to imagine what might be if the State of Texas would offer support rather than sanctions, and if they would also simply get out of the district’s way.

 Austin ISD has a strong board with a broad mix of highly relevant experience. All nine members were endorsed by the district’s union, Education Austin, and all serve by working long hours without pay. Six members are former K-12 educators in Texas public schools – including five who taught in the district, one who worked as the district’s head of multilingual education, and several who are current or former professors in programs that teach future teachers. Another is an educational anthropologist who teaches at UT and ran programs for students in the district. Another is a journalist with a law degree and a long background in advocacy and family engagement. And another is a former foster child who was in the first graduating class of Austin ISD’s Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, ranked as one of the top public high schools in the country. Another worked as an accountant after a career as a teacher. Together, the board holds five masters’ degrees, one law degree, and two Ph.Ds. Another trustee is earning a doctorate now. They have hired a superintendent who is a graduate of the district and the son of a longtime teacher. He’s an unconventional choice – with an MBA, an engineering degree, and a career in construction and district operations – but he has also brought stability after a series of rapid superintendent turnovers. And he has worked with the board and community to navigate immensely challenging times.

 As they have tackled issue after issue, district leaders have also managed to do important and thoughtful work in many areas. The community approved a $2.4 billion bond and a crucial increase in the tax rate for operations with powerful support from district voters. The district has created systems to focus resources where they are needed most – essential but also not easy in a district with such a broad range of economic opportunity and economic need. They cleared a large backlog of special education evaluations that grew during the pandemic. They have sharply reduced the number of F-rated campuses and steadily grown the number of highly rated campuses – a measure that must be a focus no matter how flawed and opaque the state’s metrics are. And they are seeing impressive results from a grant-funded investment in early literacy.

 And still, Austin ISD risks being taken over by the state.

 The community’s worry about a takeover goes far beyond the loss of elected control. Their fears are also based in facts about what has happened since the state took control of Houston ISD. State leaders routinely call the takeover an unparalleled success, citing a higher rating for the district and near zero F rated schools. But the costs have been immense – of lost opportunity, financial cost, and damage to community and careers.

 Reports document practices that serve scores but sacrifice student learning – limiting access to 8th grade Algebra by systematically holding some students back, gaming college readiness measures in ways that are legal but offer little benefit, removing both libraries and librarians, and reducing teaching to timed and scripted lessons. Campuses have closed, enrollment has plummeted by more than 20,000 students, and teachers are fleeing. Hundreds of their replacements are uncertified. And the state-appointed leaders have eaten into the district’s fund balance by pulling hundreds of millions from reserves in ways that will be impossible to sustain.

 Good reporting and strategic advocacy are helping the whole story from Houston ISD reach more people. Our state owes deep thanks to Community Voices for Public Education for its advocacy from the beginning, the Commission on the Takeover of HISD for its new in-depth report, state and local education union leaders for advocating and organizing, elected trustees for becoming the resistance, and doctoral student Dan Dawer for work to examine the takeover through an academic lens.

 In Austin, a group called Keep Austin Schools Independent has formed to inform and organize our community. We are also lucky to have strong trustee candidates who are stepping up, not knowing what their role will be but knowing their voices will matter.

 Takeovers are looming for more Texas districts. 

 Education is on the ballot in Texas in a way it has never been before. And the results of the election could make things far better or far worse, not just here in Austin, but also for public schools across our state. Voters in the Democratic primaries chose proven public education supporters up and down the ballot. And for people who know that change is needed for Texas public schools, Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for Texas Governor, is carrying a whole state’s hopes. She’s the mom of children who chose Austin ISD schools, a former AISD school board president, and a Texas House member who served her community and fought for Texas students on the public education committee. Her office became a place of pilgrimage for public education advocates, who would visit their own representatives, then stop by her office, too.

 A huge amount is at stake – not only for Austin, but for public education statewide. Dozens of Texas districts are just one or two years away from potential takeover. Schools are struggling after years of underfunding. And increasingly, the state’s vision of education is focused on the narrow measure of standardized tests – despite clear evidence that families and educators want and need something more for the 5 million students of Texas

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Injustice, Lies, Parents, Privatization, State Takeover, Texas

Politifact Rates Video Attacking Talarico as a Pedophile to be AI Fake, Generated by Russian Bot

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2026 //
6

When Republicans start losing, they get desperate and spread lies. The best lies are created by Russian bots. Politifact rated a vile video attacking Talarico as a pedophile as an AI fake.

Politifact reported:

This video shows a former James Talarico student accusing him of misconduct.

Pants on Fire!

2026 MIDTERMSARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCETEXASX POSTS

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Texas state Rep. James Talarico arrives at a campaign event in Plano, Texas, on Oct. 18, 2026. (AP)
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Texas state Rep. James Talarico arrives at a campaign event in Plano, Texas, on Oct. 18, 2026. (AP)

By Jeff Cercone
October 22, 2026

Russian disinformation group targets James Talarico with baseless claim in AI-generated video

IF YOUR TIME IS SHORT

  • The Russian disinformation campaign known as Storm-1516 used artificial intelligence to create a video that impersonated a real man, and claimed it showed a former student accusing James Talarico of misconduct, researchers say.
  • The account that initially shared the video was created in September and is based in Romania, NewsGuard reported.

See the sources for this fact-check

A social media video purporting to show a former student accusing Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico of sexual misconduct is the latest example of how Russian groups are generating false information to influence U.S. elections, researchers say.

As of Oct. 22, X had suspended the account that originally posted the baseless claim, but other accounts have since shared it. NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, reported that X said the account was created in September with Romania as the signup country. 

Talarico spokesperson JT Ennis issued an emailed statement to PolitiFact about the video.

“The most powerful people in the world know they can’t beat James Talarico with the truth, so they’re slandering him with AI deepfakes, foreign bots, and conspiracy theories to protect their broken, corrupt political system,” Ennis said.

What we know about the video’s origin

Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor and head of its Media Forensic Hub, said the video is the work of Storm-1516, a Russian propaganda campaign he said made a similar baseless attack on Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz in 2024 when Walz ran for vice president. In 2024, the group used a paid actor from West Africa to attack Walz, Linvill said.

Linvill said this video was generated to look like a real man who has an account on another platform. The video shows a man claiming to have been a former student of Talarico at Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, where Talarico taught Language Arts before his political career as a state representative.

Graphika, a social media analytics company, said in a blog post that the X account that originally shared the video “very likely” impersonated a Facebook user by the same name. That person lives in Texas and was a former student of Talarico. The man has praised Talarico on his Facebook page on several occasions, as recently as February, Graphika noted.

Fact-checkers at Lead Stories spoke with that man and he said the video is not of him, and denied accusing Talarico of misconduct. PolitiFact reached out to him via Facebook, but he didn’t immediately respond. PolitiFact’s review of the man’s Facebook page found no video of him accusing Talarico.

NewsGuard reported that the videos had many signs of AI generation, such as unnatural eye movements and stagnant facial expressions, and that an AI detection tool showed a 98% likelihood of being a deepfake. A deepfake is a machine generated image or video that changes faces, bodies or voices, making people appear to do and say things that they never did or said. 

Graphika said social media accounts known to amplify Storm-1516 content and several accounts from U.S. conservatives shared the video. It said a prominent Storm-1516 amplifier, SGAnon, originally shared the video, then deleted it, writing on X that an analysis showed it was “artificially generated.”

The Russian disinformation playbook

Linvill said Storm-1516 typically uses the same influencers to spread false narratives into political conversations.

“If you examine the recent content of the influencers who first shared this narrative you can easily identify other Storm-1516 lies,” Linvill said. “We believe they are paid to do this. In the same way marketing companies pay influencers to share products, the Russians pay influencers to share lies.”

The New York Times recently reported that Russia and other foreign governments have stepped up efforts to influence U.S. elections, mostly targeting Democrats.

Linvill co-wrote a recent report about Storm-1516 and its work targeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and found such campaigns often are not aimed at changing people’s behavior or opinions, but seek to shape public discourse.

He said the study’s findings apply to this baseless Talarico narrative.

“By entrenching people in this view of Talarico, the Russians likely hope to exacerbate extreme partisanship and also encourage people to get off the couch and vote for Ken Paxton,” Linvill said. “People who already like Talarico are going to dismiss this claim as the obvious fake it is, but they aren’t the audience.”

We rate the claim that this video shows Talarico’s former student accusing him of misconduct Pants on Fire! 

Our Sources

X post, Oct. 20, 2026

X post, Oct. 21, 2026

X post, Oct. 22, 2026

X post, Oct. 22, 2026

SGAnon, X post, Oct. 20, 2026

Facebook post, Feb. 14, 2026

Facebook post, May 25, 2021

Facebook page

NewsGuard, Russian Deepfake Accuses Talarico of Sexually Abusing Student, Oct. 21, 2026

Lead Stories, Fact Check: FAKE Video Shows Man Claiming to Be Ex-Student of Democratic Senate Nominee James Talarico — Real Zyon Lewis Says It Is Not Him, Oct. 21, 2026

Darren Linvill, Professor, Clemson University Media Forensics Hub, X posts, Oct. 21, 2026

Darren Linvill, Professor, Clemson University Media Forensics Hub, email interview, Oct. 22, 2026

PNAS, State- sponsored agenda setting: Measuring the impact of narrative laundering, Aug. 3, 2026 

Graphika, research brief shared with PolitiFact, Oct. 22, 2026

Graphika, Storm-1516 Produces Very Likely Deepfake Videos of Student Accusing Democratic Senate Candidate of Sexual Assault, Oct. 21, 2026

Alethea spokesperson, email interview, Oct. 22, 2026

The Gnida Project, X post, Oct. 21, 2026 

Agence France-Presse, Tim Walz targeted by unfounded sexual abuse claim, Oct. 21, 2024

The New York Times, Russia Appears to Step Up Efforts to Influence U.S. Voters, Oct. 16, 2026

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake News, Fraud, Hoax, International, Lies, Republicans

Adam Kinzinger: Corruption, Graft, and Grifting in D.C.

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2026 //
1

Ever since he served on the January 6th committee, along with Liz Cheney, two Republicans who cared more about their country than their party, I have admired Adam Kinzinger and faithfully read his blog.

Here is his roundup of the latest scandals surrounding the Trump administration. To hear his audios and see his videos, please open the link.

Hey everybody. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.

Our top story today: more corruption coming out of the White House. This one centers on a Venezuelan billionaire who needed a pardon. His family gave Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, a 50 million dollar job while she was still a U.S. attorney. Or at least still calling herself one. A judge had already ruled she was in that office unlawfully. Two weeks after she started working for the billionaire, he had his pardon. What a coincidence!

We’ll also get into Steve Witkoff calling Vladimir Putin a humanitarian, the president’s new round of election-season bribes, a look inside the obscure DOJ office greenlighting Trump’s worst ideas, and the president’s own son breaking with him over the Iran war.

So do me a favor. Like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Let’s get to it.

1. Habba’s $50 Million Pardon Payday

Julio Herrera Velutini is a billionaire banker from one of the oldest families in Venezuela. In 2022, he was charged with felony bribery for trying to get the governor of Puerto Rico to fire the regulator who was investigating his bank. In August 2025, his lawyer, who had been on Trump’s personal legal team, got that knocked down to a single misdemeanor campaign finance count. Career prosecutors were furious. Herrera wasn’t satisfied either. He wanted the record wiped clean.

So his 27-year-old daughter gave 3.5 million dollars to a Trump super PAC. Still no pardon. Then, in late October 2025, she registered a company in Florida called Concord Partners. Nobody seems to know what it does, including people inside the family’s own business empire. Within days, Alina Habba signed on as general counsel with a contract for ten million dollars a year for four years. The New York Times got a look at the terms. Once you add in bonuses, the total was around 50 million dollars. At that moment she was the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, a job a federal judge had already ruled she was holding unlawfully.

She started the Concord job January 1st. By then she was a senior adviser to the Attorney General, overseeing U.S. attorneys, with an office at the Justice Department and a Marshals protective detail. So she was working for the Herreras and the Justice Department at the same time. Two weeks later, on January 15th, Trump gave Herrera a full and unconditional pardon. The governor he was accused of bribing and the former FBI agent who worked for him were pardoned the same day, right before they were due to be sentenced.

Habba says any suggestion her job had anything to do with the pardon is “false and defamatory,” and that the DOJ knew about the job and signed off on it. The department says she never spoke to anyone about a pardon. The White House says she had nothing to do with it. People who know the terms of her contract told the Times they believed she was hired to help get the pardon, and were surprised at the size of the number.

Look, maybe a 27-year-old started a company nobody can describe and decided the first thing it needed was a 50 million dollar general counsel who happened to be the president’s former lawyer, and the pardon two weeks later is just luck. That’s what Habba and the White House want you to believe.

But the Times reports there’s now a whole pardon industry in Washington, where wealthy criminals pay fixers big money to get the president’s attention. For Herrera, the person he paid just happened to be working inside the Justice Department when the check cleared. How convenient!

2. Witkoff Calls Putin Humanitarian

Before we get into the shameless flattery, some good news: Stephen Hubbard is free. In 2022, he was living in Ukraine when the Russians invaded. They accused the 74-year-old of being a mercenary and sentenced him to nearly seven years in a Russian jail. The State Department called it what it was: a blatant wrongful detention. But after a phone call between Trump and Putin, he’s finally on his way home.

This is a good thing, but it doesn’t make Putin a good person. It doesn’t erase the four years this man spent locked up. When terrorists release hostages, we breathe a sigh of relief. We don’t praise the captors. But that’s exactly what Steve Witkoff, the president’s point man on Russia, did today in St. Petersburg. Have a listen.

A humanitarian. If you’re a regular listener, you can probably guess what I have to say about that. But I’ll say it anyway. This is the man who constantly bombs Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. This is the man who has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children. This is a man who runs a brutal authoritarian regime that captures dozens of Americans just like Hubbard as bargaining chips. And that’s all these people are to Moscow. Just two weeks ago, a top Russian official posted that the Kremlin needed to stock back up.

This time around, there wasn’t a prisoner swap. Trump bragged about that, claiming we gave up nothing. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that couldn’t be further from the truth. Trump has been on a gift-giving spree for Putin lately, and every one of those gifts is worth more to him than a hundred Russian prisoners. This is not a guy who cares about his own people. If he did, he wouldn’t be sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to die in Ukraine.

This goes deeper than Witkoff. Flattery has been the strategy at every level of this administration from the beginning. If it was getting us somewhere, that would be one thing. But it isn’t. It’s been two years. There’s always just one more meeting. One more trip to Moscow. One more excuse for Witkoff and Kushner to dine at the Kremlin. Peace in Ukraine is always around the corner, but it never comes.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that peace really is around the corner. But as long as we’re calling Putin a humanitarian, I don’t have high hopes.

3. Trump Holds Veterans Hostage

We’ve already talked about the 5,000 dollar checks, and the 90 dollar bonuses to seniors on Medicare. We also talked about the 500 dollar Obamacare checks that came with letters bragging about Trump’s healthcare record. More recently there was the 8 billion dollar bailout for farmers suffering from the Iran war’s effect on diesel. Last night in North Carolina, Trump indulged in a little more shameless bribery. But this time was a little different. Have a listen.

He then said “We will never abandon the heroes who served America.” Unless the GOP loses, of course. We’re talking about Marines and their families who were poisoned by water contaminated with industrial solvents, and Trump is holding their rightful settlements hostage. It doesn’t get more shameless than that.

He used a similar strategy in Kansas, telling corn farmers he’d approve E15 sales year-round to boost their profits, but only if the Democrat lost. The farm bailout also came with a promise of more “when the Republicans win.” The handouts were bad enough. But now Trump is telling voters he’ll refuse to do his job unless the GOP keeps their majorities.

He’s clearly getting more desperate by the day. Considering the polls that have been coming out, it’s no wonder. The New York Times and Siena had another bruiser for the GOP this morning. Trump’s approval at a record low 36 percent. Democrats up 11 on the generic ballot. And a few very revealing questions.

Which party understands people like me? Democrats 53, Republicans 39. Which party is the party of the working class? 53 to 40. Which party can fix my problems? 51 to 40. Democrats had a small lead on these questions in 2024. In two years, those leads have expanded to huge gaps. On which party keeps its promises, voters flipped altogether. Democrats now lead 46 to 38.

Voters don’t trust Trump any further than they can throw him, which, thanks to those Big Macs, isn’t very far. That lack of trust has trickled down to the GOP at large. Nobody is buying Trump’s promises. But he’ll make them anyway, and disrespect our veterans in the process.

One thing I can promise him: that strategy isn’t going to turn out so well in November.

4. DOJ Rubber Stamp Exposed

Every president has a small team of about two dozen lawyers on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. It’s called the Office of Legal Counsel. And its job is to tell the executive branch whether what it wants to do is legal, especially when it’s never been tried before.

For decades, that office was a real check. Its legal opinions bind the entire executive branch. And since President Kennedy, it has reviewed executive orders before the president signs them.

That changed in Trump’s second term. His team never sent his day-one executive orders to the office for review. In fact, the office went months without anyone even leading it. And when reviews resumed, it could offer comments but no longer had the final word.

Jack Goldsmith, who ran the office under President George W. Bush, said sidelining it was part of a strategy to ensure the president “can do whatever he wants.”

That might as well be true, as far as the office is now concerned. The Washington Post reports that the office is now run by Elliot Gaiser. He’s a lawyer from Trump’s 2020 campaign and, to this day, he refuses to say who won that election. Asked directly, he said Biden was sworn in and certified. What he privately thinks, he said, is privileged legal advice.

That’s the man who decides what’s legal for this White House. And his answer is almost always yes.

According to the Post, his office has signed off on global tariffs, on blowing up boats in international waters, on refusing to spend money Congress appropriated, and on deploying the National Guard.

And that’s just the start. It declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. It said the government can seize state voter rolls and hand them to immigration agents. And in August, it stretched executive privilege to cover outside advisers, shielding people who don’t even work for the government from having to testify.

A former lawyer in the office said its opinions are usually based on shoddy legal arguments. Under previous administrations, the lawyer said, “you have opinions that at least try to grapple with counterarguments.” Not anymore.

We’re two weeks away from the midterms, and the man in the White House has a history of refusing to accept election results he doesn’t like. If that happens again, this is the office that’ll tell him whether he can follow through on whatever crazy idea he comes up with. Which is a problem, because so far this office hasn’t told him no.

5. Don Jr. Splits With Dad

Since the 2024 presidential campaign, Don Jr. has held a simple vision on foreign policy: keep America out of another war in the Middle East. That’s the same promise his father made on the trail. And a promise Don Jr. fully expected him to keep.

When Iran fired missiles at Israel in April 2024, Don Jr. posted on X: “Remember when they said Trump would get us into a full-blown war with Iran?” Then he added, “Times like these should make us all realize how lucky we were to have Trump, his strength and his resolve.” Nearly eight months since it began, President Trump’s war with Iran continues with no end in sight.

And Don. Jr. isn’t happy about it. The Atlantic reports that Don Jr. opposed the war from the beginning and even advised his father against it. One person close to him said, “Don Jr. has kept his views on the subject private, as he would never publicly break with his dad on an issue like this. But I can’t imagine anyone who knows Don would be surprised by his personal views.” Another remarked, “Don Jr. is the most MAGA of them all.”

That’s just the point. This isn’t a Never Trumper. This is the president’s son. The man who helped sell the movement on the idea that his father was the one who’d keep us out of a war. And it’s not just him. The Atlantic says Vance opposed the war privately. Meanwhile, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubted Netanyahu’s pitch that you could change the regime from the air.

Trump didn’t listen. And he broke the campaign promise he made again and again to voters. Now he owns the consequences. A Pew Research survey found that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of how he’s handled the Iran War. Nearly half think it drags on for more than a year. That’s far beyond the administration’s initial estimate of four to six weeks.

And every day it drags on, more of the people who believed his promise will turn against him at the ballot box. Which is bad news for Trump, but good news for the country.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Trump Claims That Schools in 5 States Encourage Transgender Surgery

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2026 //
20

At a rally a few days ago in Dalton, Georgia, Trump made the preposterous claim that five states allow schools to promote transgender surgery.

We got critical race theory and transgender mutilization insanity out of our schools. I mean, we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later. It’s true. And teachers make — somebody makes a decision. Can you imagine? Goodbye, Timmy. I love you so much.

I’ll see you later. And you say where’s my son? My son is in the hospital. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? They don’t even need approval. It’s sick. You’ll have five — I think Minnesota and some others. I think it’s five or six states. You know that, right? So — and we made English the official language of the United States of America.

He told the same story about the notorious five states repeatedly in the 2024 election, and each time he said it, the news media said it was false. He never produced evidence. Never. Not one single instance.

No teacher. No student. No Timmy. No Tammy.

At first, I was outraged that no journalist called him out for this lie.

But as I read the speech, I realized there were so many lies that it would be overwhelming to correct them all.

Please, if you can stomach it, read the clips from this speech given in Dalton, Georgia, on October 16, 2026.

Categories Fake News, Fraud, Gender, Lies, Trump

Mary Trump: Sleepy Donald Lies the Way Other People Breathe

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2026 //
3

Mary L. Trump is Donald Trump’s niece, the daughter of his late older brother. She knows him well. She is a trained psychologist. She has beeen earning the world about him since early in his first term. It’s safe to say that she loathes Uncle Donald.

She wrote today:

Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of Trump Trolls Trump. It has been 635 interminable days since Inauguration Day, January 20th, 2025. But there’s good news. The midterm elections are just 17 days away. So first up, make sure your voter registration is up to date. And if you can vote early, please do so. As always, we are here to ridicule and mock mercilessly this inept, corrupt, and dangerous regime.

Let’s dive right in with a truism that has become increasingly difficult to deny. Donald lies like most people breathe. In fact, I think in some cases he lies more fluently than I breathe. It’s second nature to him at this point, or maybe it’s just his nature.

Sometimes those lies get us into serious trouble. Earlier we saw Donald promising, as he has done time and time and time again, that he would bring energy prices down by 50 percent. That hasn’t happened. And actually the very opposite has happened because his war on Iran, his war of choice, has helped drive energy prices up across the board.

I think it’s worth remembering that Donald lied about this too, because back in 2024 when he was asking Americans to put him back in the White House, which sadly 78 million of us thought was a good idea, this is what he had to say.

We will expel the war mongers from our government. Look at Trump. Just look at this guy. He’s going to go to war. He’s going to take us. No, no. Look at me. I’m the one that kept us out of war. I’m the only president that didn’t start a war. I didn’t start a war. Started no war. I was the first president in decades who started no new war. There are wars all over. He said, “Bring back Trump. It’ll all end. It all ended. We had no problem. I’m going to keep you out of wars. I kept you out of wars. We had no wars with Donald Trump as your president. Remember when crooked Hillary Clinton used to say, “He’s going to get us into a war. Look at him. Look at his rhetoric.” I said, “No, my rhetoric’s going to keep us out of wars.

Really? Threatening genocide is not going to keep us out of wars. Oh, wait a second. He’s threatening genocide against the country he went to war with, an unprovoked war of choice. No one knows how long this war is going to last because he keeps lying about that too. In fact, he told us it would be a matter of days or a couple of weeks. It’s been over six months.

The truth of the matter is, although we are actively still at war with Iran, a war that is expanding because Donald has completely lost control of it, we lost simply by getting involved. Back in June, Vice President Baby JD Vance told us that a deal with Iran was just around the corner. So it isn’t just Donald who is lying to our faces about how things are going. This is Vance in an interview with Robert Costa on CBS’s Sunday morning recorded on June 9th.

Right now, I feel that we are in a position to get a deal that is good for the United States economically and that really does deal with the Iranian nuclear program, not just now, not just while Donald Trump is president, but for the long term, to where my kids can say when they’re adults, Iran is not going to have a nuclear weapon. That’s the goal of the policy, and I think we’re very close to achieving that goal, but we still got some wood to chop and we’re going to keep doing it. You say very close. How soon could the deal happen before the midterm elections? Oh, absolutely. No, I think we’re going to know a lot before the midterm elections. Look, I think that the deal could happen in the next week, but the deal could also happen months from now.

Well, it’s not like there’s much difference between a week and months from now. Before the midterm elections though, absolutely, which as I mentioned, are only 17 days away. Also, remember the goal of this war is to make sure that Iran doesn’t have nuclear capability. And if that’s really what Donald and his ilk were interested in, then guess what he shouldn’t have done? Rip up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran nuclear deal, which actually had Iran agreeing not to develop nuclear weapon capability. These guys cannot win for losing.

Speaking of which, back in April, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott appeared on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo. Remember her? I mean, I know she is much missed and lamented, but Scott’s message was simple. Sure, the war is raging kind of out of control. Sure, prices are rising, but don’t worry your pretty little heads about that. Everything’s on track. And we of course have Donald to thank for all of that. Scott had another message for the American people though, and this is what it was.

Great news, by the way. The fact of the matter is that all of the cylinders are kicking. It is good news. You can even feel in our environment how good things are getting. Gas prices continue to come down, which means that your groceries will come down a little bit as well. We’ve got a lot of good signs in the economy. We just need to continue to execute and have confidence in the choices the American people have made by making President Trump their president and keeping Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. Let me just say for the average person in the country, President Trump loves you.

Well, I don’t know. Does he? Considering he doesn’t know what love is, I find that highly suspect and untrue. Gas prices are coming down, aren’t they? Well, no, they’re not, because Brent crude oil is now over 105 dollars a barrel, which translates to diesel, the stuff that trucks need to get around, at 6.27 dollars a gallon. So I don’t think Donald loves you. The economy is not doing well.

As I mentioned, with the midterms this close, I can’t wait until I can actually say the midterms are two weeks away. But Donald, he’s not quite taking in what’s happening. How does he think things are doing? How does he think he’s doing? Because really, that’s the only thing he’s concerned about. Well, let me ask you this question. If Donald were asked to grade his own performance on the economy, what grade do you think he would give himself in the midst of economic catastrophe? 

We’re doing an unbelievable job. Costs are coming way down. I inherited very, very high costs and they’re all coming down now. The food, the groceries, it’s all coming down. We’ve done a great job. I think we should be giving an A plus on the economy, but I think it’s coming. People are starting to talk about it.

Interviewer: I do want to talk about the economy, sir, here at home, and I wonder what grade you would give.

A plus, Donald responds.

A plus, the interviewer repeats.

Yeah. A plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, Donald says.

Well, it makes sense that he would give himself a grade that doesn’t exist. Now, Donald is laser focused on the needs of the American people. He’s working day and night to make sure that our lives are improved. I mean, you can tell by the fact that crews are working around the clock to get the ballroom built. That’s not making my life better. He’s making oil deals with Russia to help refill their much depleted coffers to aid them in attacking our ally Ukraine. That’s definitely not making my life better.

Unfortunately though, according to him and his enablers, we’re still dealing with the damage Joe Biden left behind. Donald has a few words for his predecessor. Donald has told us that he is working his considerable ass off. 

He has one ability I don’t have. He sleeps. He can sleep. This guy goes on a beach and he lays down on one of those beach chairs. They weigh six ounces and he can’t lift it, but he has an ability to fall asleep while on camera. He can lie down on one of those things and in minutes, he’s stone cold out. How does he do it? And he’s got cameras because he’s in prison, so they have cameras on him. And then they show him sleeping on the beach. You’ll never see me sleeping in front of camera. I have to tell you, he’s a different guy. He looks different than he used to. He acts different than he used to. He’s even slower than he used to be. And I wouldn’t say he’s at the top of his game. Would you think their message is Sleepy Joe because he’s not all there? Right now, I think I’m sharper than I was 25 years ago, but who the hell does? You’ll never see me sleeping in front of Joe.

I mean, that’s the reaction to listening to Donald talk about himself because I have never seen a sleepier person. That hypersomnia is not a good thing, but it’s so much nicer when he’s sleeping, isn’t it? Again, as we’ve talked about before, Donald is a master of projection, and clearly when he’s talking about Sleepy Joe Biden, he’s talking about himself because I have never met such a hypersomnolent person in my life. Although to be fair, sleepy Donald is my favorite mode of Donald.

I want to turn now to Donald’s relentless crusade against corruption. Wait a minute, sorry. Is crusade a synonym for embrace? Embrace of corruption? Well, let’s find out.

We know that Baby JD Vance is in charge of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which is fabulous. This was established by executive order back in March. The only thing that surprised me about that is that he didn’t ask Elon Musk or Ken Paxton to head that task force, but we’re talking about criminals here, hardened criminals, and Donald, as is his want, is looking at them very strongly, which is a phrase I still cannot make sense of. I do not know what it means to look at something very strongly. I think Superman was able to do that, but he had laser beams coming out of his eyes.

Now, Donald explains exactly what he has done to crack down on criminality. Before you get excited, it does not mean he’s had himself arrested. As I listen to him describe these criminals, I have a lingering question. You may have the same one, here is what he said:

91 percent of the crime in Washington DC, as an example, was caused by 2.1 percent of the population. These are many career criminals, sick people, mental problems.

Okay. I mean, I know DC’s a small town, but I didn’t think it was so small that Donald comprised 2.1 percent of the population. Oh wait, but it’s not just him. He has a lot of co-conspirators out there. If you add in all of his co-conspirators, then maybe yes, those hardened career criminals, the Vances and the Hegseths and the Musks and the Bessents and all of them might indeed make up 2.1 percent of the DC population, and they are absolutely committing over 90 percent of the crime there.

As we approach the midterms, please, please make sure your voter registration is up to date and know where your polling location is. Check both of those things repeatedly because people can get struck off the voter rolls without their knowing it right before the election, and sometimes polling places change. Republicans are going to pull out all the stops, so we need to stay on top of this.

You don’t want any surprises when you go to vote on election day if you vote in person. A lot of states offer early voting, so check your options and if you can vote early, please do so. I am one of those people. I’m old school. I like to go vote on election day, but vote early, vote by mail in states where you still think that’s the safe thing to do.

And when you step into that voting booth, remember how we got here and who brought us to this very dark time in our history. Encourage other people to vote and remind them that Donald himself said he wants us to pretend he’s on the ballot. So that’s very clear. Vote Democratic up and down the ballot.

“I can always say that the next president will get a lot of credit for what I’ve done. Please remember it was me, not them,” Donald says.

Oh, we will remember. We will remember. And as we’re remembering, we are going to tear down everything on the planet that has your name on it.

Thank you so much for joining us for Trump Trolls Trump week 91. Remember, mockery is our superpower, and we will be here every single week to call out the hypocrisy, the ineptitude, and the outright corruption of this incredibly dangerous and misguided regime. 

Go vote. 

Categories Character, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Marc Elias: No Doubt! Trump Lost the 2020 Election.

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
3

Marc Elias is a leading lawyer in defense of democracy. He has won numerous federal and state cases in defense of voting rights. In this post, Elias refutes The Big Lie.

By Marc Elias · Democracy Docket founder

This weekend, in an interview with Ted Koppel on CBS’s Sunday Morning, Steve Bannon confirmed what I have been saying for years: “The core belief of the MAGA movement is [Trump] won the 2020 election.”

When confronted with the fact that Trump and his allies lost more than 60 court cases challenging dddddddssstsdtsrsrssssssssssrsrrerzzfzzrz sadp the election results, Bannon resorted to a familiar GOP tactic. He falsely suggested that the cases were thrown out on technicalities: “We can go debate this another time, but we didn’t have standing. We never even got into court.”

Even worse, Koppel told viewers that Bannon was “technically correct; they didn’t have standing. They couldn’t find a judge who thought they had a significant case worth hearing.”

Koppel may have meant that the cases failed because they lacked merit. But what he said is simply wrong.

Trump and his allies found plenty of judges willing to hear them out, in many cases through hours or even days of testimony and argument. Those judges listened, weighed the evidence and ruled against them.

I know, because I was the lawyer who helped Joe Biden defeat those cases one by one.

Correcting the record matters as we approach another election in which Trump and the GOP are once again spreading lies. So let me put this one to bed, once and for all.

In 2022, a group of prominent conservatives reviewed every one of the 64 cases that Trump and his allies brought in the six key battleground states. The group included former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, former Republican Sen. John Danforth and retired federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig, along with two other retired federal judges and another former Republican senator.

Their conclusion was stark: “Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Most importantly, their report directly rebuts the claim Bannon is making today: that Trump never got his day in court. “Of the 64 cases brought by Trump and his supporters,” they wrote, “twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, fourteen were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before a hearing on the merits, and 30 cases included a hearing on the merits.”

In other words, fewer than one-third of the cases were dismissed by a court before reaching the merits. In another 14, Trump’s side walked away rather than test its claims in front of a judge.

Trump’s problem was never a lack of opportunity. As the report’s authors put it, “Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states.”

Consider the record.

In Arizona, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party went to court claiming that Election Day votes for Trump had been wrongly thrown out. Over a six-hour hearing, the claim that thousands of voters had been disenfranchised fell apart. The campaign narrowed its case to a handful of ballots and the judge dismissed it.

In Wisconsin, Trump requested recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties, the state’s two largest Democratic strongholds. The recounts increased Biden’s lead.

Trump then lost in federal court and before the state’s conservative-majority Supreme Court.

The federal judge, whom Trump himself appointed, found that Trump had standing, held a daylong hearing, and ruled against him anyway: “This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits.”

When the Trump campaign asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to throw out more than 221,000 absentee ballots, the conservative court refused. As one justice noted, the president “failed to point to even one vote cast in this election by an ineligible voter.”

In Nevada, Trump’s electors filed and litigated a full election contest, with evidence submitted by both sides. They alleged everything from a vote-buying scheme to illegal voting to malfunctioning voting machines in Clark County. In the end, the judge found that they had failed to prove their allegations “under any standard of proof.” The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously affirmed.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign’s lawsuit over ballot counting rested on a poll watcher’s account of what someone else had told her. The judge rejected it as “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.” In another Michigan case, a judge heard evidence on claims of fraud at Detroit’s TCF Center and found the plaintiffs’ version of events “incorrect and not credible.”

In Georgia, every ballot was counted three times, including a full hand count. There, one of the Trump campaign’s first lawsuits fell apart within a day. It concerned just 53 absentee ballots in Chatham County. County election officials testified that the ballots had arrived on time, and the judge dismissed the case at the end of the hearing.

Then there is Pennsylvania, where Rudy Giuliani appeared in court himself. He told the judge there was “widespread, nationwide voter fraud.” But under questioning, he admitted, “This is not a fraud case.”

In dismissing the lawsuit, the judge wrote that the campaign had offered “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.” On appeal, a Trump-appointed judge wrote for a unanimous panel: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Many of these cases were reviewed by appeals courts or state supreme courts with Republican-appointed or conservative majorities. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up any of them.

The Big Lie survives because reporters fail to push back on claims like Bannon’s. The lie that Trump won the 2020 election is a disease, and every suggestion that Trump never had his day in court helps it spread.

Over the past six years, that disease has infected our politics and our culture, and it has bred new conspiracy theories along the way. It drove insurrectionists to storm the U.S. Capitol. And it helped Trump win a second term, and with it a second chance to undermine our democracy.

To fight back, we must correct the record — not just for the past but for the future.

Categories Arizona, Elections, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Parker Molloy: What the Media Got Wrong About Jack Smith’s Testimony and Eric Schmitt’s Accusation

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2026 //
0

Republicans in Congress are clearly out to incriminate Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, who was appointed by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate former President Donald J. Trump for his role in the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

In the latest debacle, Senator Eric Schmitt garnered headlines for making a huge mistake. He wanted to trap Smith in a lie so he could be charged with perjury. He claimed to have proof that Smith flew to Atlanta under the pretext of watching a basketball game when his real purpose was to meet secretly with Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis. Smith said it was untrue. On the night in question, he was not in Atlanta. Instead, he attended a women’s basketball game in Maryland, in which the phenomenal Caitlin Clark played.

Blogger Parker Molloy pointed out that the news coverage of Schmitt’s collossal error overshadowed the importance of Jack Smith’s eloquent testimony. Molloy’s blog is titled “The present Age.”

What is bizarre about the Republicans’ rage towards Jack Smith is that they are trying to exonerate the man who tried to stage a coup against the Constitution and overturn the election. I know they are afraid of Trump and cower before him. But must they join in the fantasy that the bloody January 6 insurrection was no big deal, just a load of faithful patriots visiting the U.S. Capitol. They were there. Weren’t they hiding under their chairs and in secret rooms?

Molloy writes, in part:

If, like me this week, you heard about this hearing via social media or just a stray article that made its way through your feed, you probably saw one specific highlight: Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) swung for the fences during his questioning of Smith, and… well… it didn’t go how he thought it would.

The short version (which you’ve probably seen) is that Schmitt claimed Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024 and suggested he’d gone to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Both Smith and Willis had been involved in investigating Donald Trump’s alleged crimes and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” he asked. Smith said no. Schmitt continued: “The day before, Fani Willis came clean with her affair with the prosecutor.” And Smith said that he had never met Willis during his time as special counsel, and he had definitely not been in attendance at that Hawks game.

Schmitt then whipped out a poster board that purported to show evidence that Smith had lied under oath.

“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself,” Schmitt said, dripping with smug confidence. And as you probably know by now, no, Smith wasn’t at that game. He was actually at a University of Maryland women’s basketball game that night. Schmitt seemed to have been confusing the Hawks (NBA team) with the Hawkeyes (NCAA team).

To use a basketball term here, Schmitt air-balled this one big time.

(Somewhat unrelated, but the Warriors-Hawks game Schmitt accused Smith of attending was the one where Steph Curry dropped 60 points, setting a season high. So, hey, I guess if you’re going to put a guy at the wrong basketball game, you might as well pick a good one.)

Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) (L) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) display a sign accusing former Special Counsel Jack Smith of meeting with Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on September 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. The committee is holding the hearing to examine Smith’s probe into Donald Trump. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Now, this flub is notable for a couple of reasons. That morning, Axios’s Jim VandeHei reported that Schmitt “is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.” I find it hard to believe the timing was a coincidence. The story ran on the same day Schmitt would try to grab the headlines with a grandstanding moment in which he’d catch Smith in a lie, committing a crime. This was supposed to help propel Schmitt to political stardom in the GOP, but instead, he came away looking like a clown. Even after being corrected, fact-checked, and called out for all of this, Schmitt continued to insistthat he was right, long after he’d been proven wrong. No surprises there.

To add to the egg on his face, there’s the additional irony that he’s the same guy who, back in August, accused Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed of not knowing ball for saying “Beat Ohio” in reference to Ohio State University (for the record, El-Sayed was right; University of Michigan and its fans regularly do say “Beat Ohio” when referring to OSU, sometimes as a bit of a taunt as Ohio State fans and alumni are known to get a bit touchy whenever someone doesn’t refer to it as “THE Ohio State University.” Hell, former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh even renamed a practice drill after the phrase).

And yes, all of this clearly is a story. It’s absolutely newsworthy that Schmitt botched his big moment on the day that Axios puffed him up. It’s newsworthy that he clearly thought this was such a slam dunk, and that guys like Benny Johnson and Sean Hannity rushed to post about it on social media, despite the fact that they had literally everything wrong. (Both later deleted their posts.) And yes, it’s newsworthy that Schmitt still won’t actually admit that he made a mistake.

But there was a lot more to the hearing that kind of got lost in the Schmitt show. And if you were paying attention to this as someone who doesn’t closely follow politics, you probably missed it. Smith said a lot of stuff that should shake the country to its core, but instead everyone ended up talking about Eric Schmitt.

And it’s not to say that news organizations ignored the other aspects of Smith’s testimony. They didn’t! But the whole thing got overshadowed by Schmitt’s moment. And I guess that the one thought I had as I read more about what happened during the rest of the hearing was that I kind of wish there was a way for news organizations to capitalize on the viral moment to help inform the public about everything else that happened, to use the viral moment specifically as an opportunity.

But to avoid contributing to the Schmittiness of this, I suppose I should also give a quick rundown of what Smith said during the hearing that I think more people should be aware of. So what did Smith actually say?

Smith told the Senate that people are being threatened with prosecution for being seen as opposing the president

In his opening statement, T-minus about 60 minutes before Schmitt grabbed the spotlight, Smith told the committee this:

As with my appearance before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, I am prepared to answer your questions truthfully. I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives, and I will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.

As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal prosecution because they are perceived to have opposed the president. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s longstanding core values and traditions.

History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It’s often weakened by attacks on the institutions and the public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January of 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the agents, prosecutors, and staff who worked on my team, simply because of their unwavering dedication to the rule of law.

I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States. However, I remain confident that the rule of law will endure, because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths, despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.

Back in July, House Judiciary Chairman and alleged knower of a disgusting abuse scandal at THE Ohio State University Jim Jordan referred Smith to the Justice Department, accusing him of knowingly making false statements in his December deposition. At issue are text messages that Smith’s team obtained involving 44 members of Congress, including Jordan. These texts were obtained through the National Archives in response to a request for White House phones. Since we live in bizarro-world, Todd Blanche, Trump’s defense attorney during Smith’s investigation, is now the attorney general. Every day is a new horror, basically.

I digress. Back to the hearing. Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked Smith whether whistleblowers who’d talked to Congress about Smith’s investigation should themselves be investigated. Smith said: “I’m not aware of any whistleblowers being investigated. I believe public servants should be protected. The members of my team, that you just mentioned, I’m extremely proud to have worked with them. And the fact that they have been targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally, and had their lives turned upside down by this Department of Justice is an outrage.”

It is a long but very interesting post. I encourage you to open the link and read it in full.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Injustice, Lies, Trump

Freddy DeBoer: No, American Schools Are Not Failing

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2026 //
8

Freddy DeBoer challenges the oft-repeated claim that American schools are failing. We have heard the same lament since 1983, when the Reagan administration published a pamphlet titled “A Nation at Risk.” That publication, the work of the National Commission on Educational Excellence, proclaimed that America’s schools, once the envy of the world, were caught in “a rising tide of mediocrity.” The report gathered every possible negative statistic about public schools and turned them into a jeremiad.

Governors formed task forces and agreed that what the nation needed most was lots more testing, which eventually turned schools into a cash cow for the testing industry. Worse, it made test scores the goal of education, not a measure.

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, passed in January 2002, made the pursuit of higher test scores a federal mandate, accompanied by harsh and punitive measures for schools that were unable to produce the ever higher test scores.

NCLB was followed by Obama’s equally punitive Race to the Top in 2010. Not only were schools targeted for not raising test scores, but individual teachers were singled out and punished. Schools were closed, teachers were fired, charter schools became a new panacea–which failed as panaceas tend to do.

The Bush brothers–President George W. and Florida Governor Jeb–claimed that accountability was the ultimate key to success.

But in the absence of dramatic test score gains, Jeb and other Republicans decided that vouchers were the ultimate panacea: no accountability, just choose any school you want, be it religious, private, online, or homeschooling. Quality no longer mattered. Accountability no longer mattered (except for the majority of students who continued to enroll in public schools and continued to take the standardized tests). Just choice.

Go back to the beginning: that infamous report called “A Nation at Risk.” One of the staff members who wrote the report was a young man named James Harvey. In 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the release of that influential report, James Harvey wrote an article declaring that the conclusions of the report were vastly overstated. He wrote an article in The Washington Post about “how we cooked the books.”

Freddy DeBoer probably didn’t read James Harvey’s brilliant and disturbing article. But he writes from the same perspective. Our public schools have been the target of a huge smear job. The smear was a fake. It was used to promote charter schools and vouchers. Many of our public schools are excellent. Some are in desperate need of desperate measures, like reduced class sizes, wraparound services for students and families. They are not worse than they used to be. Ninety percent of our population attended public schools. Their graduates created the most powerful nation in the world. Can we do better? Of course, especially for children with the greatest needs. Are public schools failing? No.

This is what DeBoer thinks:

The belief that American public schools are an international embarrassment, sites of endless failure, is one of the few things our polarized political system seems to agree on. After all, the transition from George W. Bush’s presidential education policy to that of Barack Obama was one of remarkable continuity, based on a shared premise: Our schools were in a broad state of emergency. Today, politicians of both parties still tell that story, as do op-ed pages and nonprofit organizations and bipartisan cable panels. The notion has hardened into an axiom, a claim so familiar that the people making it no longer feel obligated to back it up with evidence. But we don’t have to buy this narrative, and we shouldn’t — because the evidence tells us that the narrative just isn’t true.

The best way to consider a country’s educational performance is in relation to the performance of international peers, and the most authoritative international benchmark is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, which tests 15-year-olds across 81 education systems. In the most recent results, from 2022, American students tested better in reading than 68 of the 80 other systems and well above the international average. In science, they bested 56 of 80. Math is our weakest subject, but even there we outscore 43 systems and tie with a dozen more, meaning that on our worst day we still do better than more than half the developed world. Our top performers look particularly good on the PISA; for example, 14 percent of American teenagers scored at the highest level in reading, double the OECD average. 

Some critics note that our education system is expensive and say that we should demand better results for our money. But this demand implies that there’s a straightforward relationship between per-pupil spending and test scores; decades of evidence demonstrate that there is not. And the results show that we produce many sterling students for our money.GLOBE STAFF; ROB Z/ADOBE

Indeed, the students at the top of our system aren’t merely fine; they’re the best on earth. American teams have placed in the top three at the International Mathematical Olympiad every year for a decade and won or tied for first in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2024. In 2025, all five members of the US physics team won gold at the International Physics Olympiad, making the United States the only country to sweep gold that year. Our chemistry, biology, informatics, linguistics, and other teams collect medals year after year. These are overwhelmingly public-school kids from ordinary suburban and urban districts, outcompeting the best academic talent the world can produce. You rarely read about them because their success doesn’t fit the declinist story.

But scores are dropping, aren’t they? Yes, and that’s exactly why international context matters. The 2022 PISA results showed an unprecedented worldwide collapse, with average scores across the OECD falling roughly 10 points in reading and 15 in math. When students in Germany, Norway, and New Zealand decline in lockstep with students in Arizona and Connecticut, the cause is plainly not American teachers, unions, or curricula. (My own guess is that the smartphone is to blame, but I can’t prove it.) Even as our raw scores fell, our international rank rose in all three subjects because our peers’ scores fell further. Again, when was the last time you heard that in our media?

None of this is to deny that some American schools are in crisis. But those failures aren’t spread evenly across our system; they’re concentrated in a small number of places suffering from poverty, structural racism, and institutional decline. The United States has the highest child-poverty rate in the OECD (roughly a quarter of our children live in poverty, versus less than 10 percent in top-scoring nations like Finland and Denmark) and our socioeconomic and demographic stratification is pronounced. As such, our aggregate scores on assessments like PISA are weighed down disproportionately by disadvantaged students. 

In Detroit, which sits at the bottom of every large urban US district tested, two-thirds of students were chronically absent in a recent year, speaking to a lack of stability and resources at the family level. What teachers could succeed in those conditions? Cleveland, Baltimore, districts in the impoverished rural areas of West Virginia — they all tell a similar story. The American schools that struggle the worst share no common curriculum, union contract, or pedagogy. What they share is extreme poverty, segregation, and decades of disinvestment — in local labor markets, transportation, and health care.

Imagine swapping the students of Detroit with those of wealthy Bloomfield Hills next door, where the schools have excellent performance metrics. Does anyone believe the students from Detroit would suddenly excel? 

Simply shoveling money at urban schools is not the answer. In fact, poorer, higher-minority schools in the United States receive significantly more per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools. As it stands, the teachers in the Detroit public school system are asked to achieve similar results to the ones in the Bloomfield system, despite the vast disparities in living and learning environments of the students they teach. 

I’m known to be very skeptical about the influence of schools and teachers on test scores, which tend to reflect the socioeconomic conditions of groups and the variation in talent levels between individuals. But you don’t have to share my views in that regard to acknowledge that our worst-performing schools face conditions that no amount of teaching quality can overcome. And consider a fact that’s almost never reported: America’s most disadvantaged students, those in the bottom international decile in socioeconomic status, rank sixth out of 64 comparable nations in math. In other words, even in the midst of all that poverty and dysfunction, our poorest kids outperform almost all of the world’s other poorest kids. The problem is not that our schools fail poor children at an unusual rate. It is that some of our communities are deprived to a scandalous degree.

In sum, our median student does just fine, our best students are the envy of the world, but our worst-performing students drag down our averages in a way that makes our overall performance look much worse than it is — and those extreme negative outliers are almost universally found in communities with intense socioeconomic challenges.

This resolves a puzzle that has baffled pollsters for 40 years. American parents consistently rate the nation’s schools quite poorly while giving their own children’s schools high marks. Average grades for the American school system writ large typically fall in the C or D range, but more than three-quarters of parents typically give their own kids’ schools an A or B. Often this is regarded as a kind of cognitive bias, of irrationality on the part of those parents; surely, they must be viewing their own schools with rose-colored glasses, or so the conventional wisdom has long held. In fact, that attitude makes perfect sense when you reflect on the quantitative reality I’ve described: Most American K-12 schools and students really are doing quite well, which is reflected in the high marks parents give to their own local schools, but like all of us, parents have heard the relentless doomsaying about the country’s schools. Parents judge their own schools from direct experience and the national system from what they see on television. That is, on the question they actually know something about, about which they have the best evidence, they’re quite positive, and they have every reason to be.

The myth of universal failure didn’t come out of nowhere, and for the record I don’t think it was born entirely in bad faith. Some of the people who spread it were no doubt animated by a real and decent impulse to improve the lives of American children, saw the awful conditions in our inner cities, and overextrapolated their impression of school failure. Others were likely so motivated to attack public schools for ideological reasons that they didn’t care much about misrepresenting the data. Whatever the motives, over time it became far too common for politicians, pundits, and members of the media to take data that showed a handful of distressed communities dragging down otherwise strong averages and present it as proof that American education was rotten from root to branch. An honest reading pointed toward investing in poor places and pursuing avenues for shared prosperity other than just schooling; the sensationalist reading pointed toward dismantling public schools. Many people chose the sensationalist one and repeated it until it became something “everybody knew.”

The stakes are significant. If the failures of American education really are systemwide, the response has to be wholesale reform — new national mandates and perhaps a federal takeover of local education policy; even more standardized testing; the criminalization of teacher unions; private school vouchers for all. But the reality is that our educational failure is concentrated, and it’s concentrated in predictable places, which means the remedy must be too: Serious investment for the communities where poverty has done its damage, not merely for the schools that sit inside them, along with an effort to build more pathways to middle class stability for those who are not academically motivated.

There is some evidence that such investment, for example in environmental cleanup or direct financial assistance for poorer families, can improve learning outcomes. There too, though, the evidence is contested and the effects unclear. But this investment offers obvious advantages: Even if bringing more money and development into poor communities does not close academic gaps, the direct economic advantages will endure. 

These efforts are both harder and more expensive than yet another round of complaining about teachers and their unions, but they have the advantage of potentially solving real problems. If we have a moral duty to improve our schools, as the school reformers insist, then that begins with a moral duty to tell the truth.

Categories Education Reform, Failure, For-Profit, Lies

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump’s Cruel, Reckless Fantasy World

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2026 //
3

As the midterm elections get nearer, Trump grows ever more desperate in his attempt to prove that he is hugely popular, that the media are liars, and that elections are fraudulent.

We have never seen anything like this. Other candidates, other presidents have faced midterm elections without falling into a pit of craziness and desperation and fraud.

Read what Heather Cox Richardson reports:

After a hearing yesterday about Trump’s Friday ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus, very early this morning—I was still awake writing yesterday’s letter—U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted the request of the media outlets to stop Trump’s order banning members of their organizations from the White House complex.

Kelly, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2017, challenged the argument of the White House that it had banned the journalists because they had endangered national security, noting that the stories to which administration lawyers claimed to object were “routine.” In fact, one of the stories the White House claimed endangered national security was based on a press call from the White House itself. According to Oliver Darcy, who writes the media newsletter Status, the anonymous “senior administration official” who provided the quotations on the call was none other than Vice President J.D. Vance.

Kelly ordered the credentials of 78 journalists restored immediately.

This morning, the White House continued to deny reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW access to the White House campus. Their lawyers asked for an emergency hearing because the administration had “already repeatedly violated the Court’s Order,” and soon after the judge ordered the administration to respond, the reporters were once again allowed into the area.

And then tonight, at least CNN and MS NOW were blocked from access to the White House state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. After Trump posted on social media that CNN and MS NOW (he called it MSDNC) were refusing to cover Xi’s visit “because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP,’” the White House told CNN it could send only an audio producer and a cameraman to the event, not a reporter or producer. Senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said: “They again said that we were specifically denied access and that they were not letting in the CNN editorial presence.”

This morning, Trump complained on social media that “[t]he Media is trying to cover up how well things are going before the Midterms, just to help Democrats.”

And that’s the gist of Trump’s attacks on media outlets: MAGA is falling apart, and he either lives in a fantasy world or hopes to stem that collapse by issuing propaganda that will convince voters he is actually winning.

The fantasy world thesis has supporting evidence in an image posted on Trump’s social media account this morning, showing Trump and Xi standing together on a red carpet in front of an airplane apparently labeled Air China. There is a military aircraft flying over a circle of stars with the words “Only Trump” superimposed in a German-style blackletter font. Behind Trump, to his right, is a young woman who looks like Trump’s loyal aide Natalie Harp standing with her hand over her heart.

Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice noted that the image was a digitally altered photo in which the image of the chief officer of protocol of the United States, Monica Crowley, had been replaced by an image that appears to be Harp.

Convincing voters he is winning is an even harder sell.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is its signature policy, and last week a federal appeals court stopped the Trump administration from sending migrants to third countries, finding that the short timeline for those renditions stripped deportees of their right to due process. The administration appears to have continued the renditions, arguing that the court had not officially notified a lower court of its decision and thus it was not yet in effect, prompting an appeals court to clarify that the flights must stop.

Today Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to step in to permit those renditions to third countries. He said that disruption of the administration’s “plans…imposes massive costs on the government and invariably requires new rounds of diplomatic engagement with countries who may be all the more skeptical of our removal efforts given the disruption.”

Also today, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for ignoring his previous orders and continuing to hold people in “inhumane and unconstitutional” conditions at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza, depriving detainees of “sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care.” Although, as Josephine Walker of Axios points out, the administration likely sees the appalling conditions of its prisons as a way to induce migrants to leave, the judge required ICE to provide adequate space and humane conditions for detainees.

Meanwhile, as Ryan J. Foley of the Associated Press reported today, a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ICE had no strategic plan for spending the unprecedented $45 billion Congress gave it in Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, and has wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on slapdash plans for mass detention.

It spent nearly $3 million for tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used, $20 million for maintaining warehouses that were never used to house detainees and are now being sold, and excessive rates to lock people up. Foley reports that the Department of Homeland Security told the GAO that it would have a plan for spending its windfall by August 31, 2027, nearly a year from now.

After Trump announced the U.S. would accept meat from other countries in order to lower food prices, on September 22 the Department of Agriculture announced the recall of more than 167,000 pounds (75,750 kg) of raw pork, beef, and goat. The items were produced without federal inspection but carried false marks claiming they had been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency said the food “should be considered misbranded and unsafe to eat.”

Trump’s insistence that the country suffers from voter fraud isn’t going well, either.

In California, Republican sheriff Chad Bianco and the Riverside County sheriff’s department confiscated more than 650,000 ballots after California voters agreed to redistrict the state to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting of Texas. The state’s Democratic attorney general immediately ordered him to return the ballots, saying he had no authority to confiscate them and that the seizure was intended to make people distrust elections.

As Uwa Ede-Osifo of the Guardian reported, the California Supreme Court today ordered Blanco to return the ballots, saying that it was Blanco, rather than voters, who was endangering elections: “Allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret, based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity,” it said.

On Saturday, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that makes it a felony to seize ballots from a county elections office.

Trump’s own claims of voter fraud also took a hit this week. As Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported today, in July, Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin claimed they had found more than 270,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Mullin stated that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada.

But when officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) met with Nevada election officials in August, they admitted Mullin’s number was inflated. After the meeting, one wrote to say that the department had confirmed just 185 people on the voter rolls were not citizens. They sent Nevada officials a list of those 185 names.

On Tuesday, Nevada told the federal government that the 185 people on the government’s list are all citizens. “Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” said Francisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”

Trump’s job approval rating continues to drop. Fifty Plus One aggregated new polls today and found that only 34.7% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, while 62.1% disapprove.

Meridith McGraw, Maggie Severns, and Suzanne Vranica of the Wall Street Journal reported today that an ad airing in major U.S. markets shows Trump promising to “defeat communism, Marxism in America once and for all,” before showing images of Trump at White House events as a choir sings “Love Me.” At the end of the ad, the screen reads: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

Former campaign finance official Daniel Weiner called the ad “an astonishing misuse of public resources in the campaign context, one of the most blatant I’ve ever seen.” Democratic lawmakers wrote to the White House demanding the ad be taken down, calling it “government propaganda” more fitting for North Korea than the U.S. and “an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”

According to the Wall Street Journal reporters, the White House says the ad is a “public service announcement,” “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Lies, Trump
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