Hey everybody. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Before we get started, a quick congratulations to the Milwaukee Brewers. Forty-four years after their last World Series appearance, they’re champions for the first time in franchise history.
Our top story today. The Washington Examiner, a right-wing outlet, says the MAGA bubble is about to burst. The argument is one I’ve been making for a while now: the movement has lost all sense of how it looks to normal people who just want lower prices and a president who doesn’t embarrass them. When the right’s own magazines start writing this five days before an election, something has shifted. We’ll walk through it.
We’ll also get into James O’Keefe charged with felony voter fraud in Minnesota, a Trump health official caught profiting off her own agency, the corporations that paid to play with Trump suddenly lawyering up, and President Obama calling out a White House that can’t keep its priorities straight.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Conservative Magazine Turns on MAGA
Let me be clear about the source. The Washington Examiner is a right-wing outlet. Its writers spent years cataloguing the Democrats’ bubble, and this piece, by Peter Laffin, starts there: Democrats lost in 2024 because they were living in one. Then he turns around. “The sheer amount of activity in Trump’s second term overwhelmed, stupefied, and ultimately numbed even his own supporters: the perfect condition for a bubble to form. And a thick one did.”
He runs through the list, and you’ve seen most of it on this show. The jet. The ballroom. The pardons. But what gets him is the recent stuff. Hegseth livestreaming an execution, and conservative podcasters lining up to defend it while 80 percent of the country recoiled. The president posting a video of a tiger killing a man, and then an AI video of himself hugging the tiger. Laffin’s point is that none of it registered inside the movement anymore. It just kept coming, and people stopped flinching.
His line: “I hate to say this, because I can’t stand it when liberals do, but none of this is normal.”
And his diagnosis is the part that matters. “A movement cut off from the mainstream stops listening to its grown-ups and begins following its edge-lords. Extremism masquerades as courage, cruelty as strength, obscenity as moral clarity. Until it pops.”
He’s describing something I lived through. The people who used to say “hey, this looks bad” got run out of the party one at a time. What’s left is the people who think the tiger video is funny.
And by the way, nobody at a conservative outlet writes this if they think Republicans are winning Tuesday. This is what it looks like when the people on the right who aren’t faking it start getting ready for the morning after.
I know what it costs to say this stuff from inside the party. He says that if November delivers a crushing verdict, Republicans have a choice: blame the media and crawl back inside, or take a hard look at themselves. I’ve watched them make that choice before. They crawled back in. Hopefully this time will be different.
2. MAGA Fraud Hunters Busted for Fraud
Yesterday a county in Minnesota charged James O’Keefe and Cam Higby with felony unlawful voting and identity theft. During the August primary, they went into polling places with “Muslim costumes” and fake accents, and gave the workers the names of real registered voters. O’Keefe told them he was a man named William Pomeranz. The real William Pomeranz found out about the stunt when these two MAGA clowns posted videos of their own crime.
Those videos were supposed to show it was easy to cheat. But they didn’t even cast ballots. Poll workers reported the fakes, and the real Pomeranz voted that evening with no problem. The Secretary of State said the system worked exactly as designed, and that trying to deceive election workers “will not be tolerated.” Impersonating a voter at the polls is a crime in Minnesota, whether or not you finish the job.
O’Keefe says the charges are “an attempt to criminalize investigative reporting” and “to distract from what we exposed as insecure elections.” So he brought a racist disguise and a camera to a polling place, and wants you to believe that he’s the victim.
He’s not the only one. Just this week we covered Scott Presler, MAGA’s top guy on election integrity, getting busted for letting out-of-state operatives vote from his Pennsylvania home.
These are guys that have built careers calling Democrats cheaters. They claim to be on the hunt for fraudsters when they themselves have no respect for elections or the people that vote in them.
For MAGA, it’s never been about the crime itself, but who’s committing it. They’ll fly into a rage at the fantasy of Muslims in Minnesota committing fraud. But when it’s one of their own? Well, they’re playing for the right team, so no biggie. MAGA is not guided by any principle. It’s the same reason JD Vance and his fraud task force can bring the hammer down on an immigrant buying a hundred bucks worth of food stamps while turning a blind eye to the grifters, fraudsters, and insider traders that infest the administration and make millions off information and influence.
The Republicans talking about fraud have their hands in the cookie jar, and the ones claiming a rigged election keep trying to get their hands on the ballots. So don’t take them at their word. Judge them by their actions, especially when those actions are criminal.
3. Trump Official Caught Cashing In
ProPublica reported on Alicia Jackson, who runs ARPA-H, a health research agency with a billion and a half dollar budget that hands out grants. Trump put her there last October. Before that she founded a company called Evernow, which sells menopause treatment online. In November she stood at the HHS podium and endorsed the government’s decision to remove safety warnings from hormone therapy. “The science is clear. Hormone therapy is safe and effective.” Her own disclosures show she held up to 300,000 dollars of Evernow stock at the time. Months later, Evernow announced a nationwide expansion.
It gets worse. Her husband holds up to 25 million dollars in Palantir. Palantir had a 19 million dollar contract with her agency when she walked in the door. In June, her agency extended it for another year. A former White House ethics lawyer told ProPublica the podium moment alone put her “within the zone of a potential violation.” As of this week, HHS has put her on leave.
Here’s what I want you to take from this. It’s not just Trump and his cabinet that are making boatloads of cash. Alicia Jackson isn’t a household name. She’s a mid-level appointee running an agency most people couldn’t pick out of a lineup. If this is what’s happening there, imagine what’s happening at the hundred other agencies nobody’s looking at. It’s gotten so bad it doesn’t even feel like anyone is trying to hide it anymore. Jon Ossoff said it best last night: “Never before has so little effort been made to cover up so much corruption.”
This is what a banana republic looks like. Corruption isn’t the exception anymore. It’s the rule.
4. Trump’s Donors Lawyer Up
Politico talked to lobbyists, lawyers, and former Hill staff. They describe tech, crypto, and industrial companies in a scramble. Their worries are simple. Democrats could take the House next week.
Companies that gave to Trump’s projects are hiring congressional-investigations lawyers. Others are lining up crisis communications plans and rehearsing for hearings. One consultant said, “The smart companies have not been waiting for the election results.” For them, November is “the deadline versus the starting gun.”
Investigations are already in the works. Senator Elizabeth Warren has sent letters to Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft about data center subsidies. Representative Robert Garcia has demanded answers from Taylor Farms about its donations to Trump’s PAC after the cyclospora outbreak. And Senator Adam Schiff wants to know whether Amazon got an edge on federal contracts because it was “willing to pay $40 million for a crappy movie about Melania.”
But that’s hardly the full list of what’s to come. According to Senator Ron Wyden’s office, which has pushed many oversight investigations, “everything is on the table.”
And companies have nowhere to hide. This administration can stonewall Congress. Companies can’t. When they are subpoenaed, they actually have to answer to the American people. How about that for a novel idea? So if Democrats win next week, every check written to the ballroom, every deal cut in the Oval Office, is about to be fair game.
5. Obama Hits a Nerve
Wednesday night played out in split screen. Trump rallied in Ohio with Vivek Ramaswamy and Jon Husted. Obama in Atlanta with Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms. The contrast could not have been sharper.
While Trump rambled about Husted’s very fine behind, Obama delivered a pointed message about how easily the White House gets distracted from the American people. All it took was one line on Saturday in Cleveland. Obama said Trump has the White House “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Obama had accused the Trump administration of driving up costs. Of pushing tariffs that hit hard working families. Of unprecedented corruption. Its response to all of that? Radio silence. But the Cheesecake Factory line? That’s where it draws the line.
The response was so far out of proportion Obama could barely keep a straight face.
That’s right. The Treasury Secretary of the United States, Scott Bessent, had lunch at a Cheesecake Factory where he told reporters Obama’s library looks like “Darth Vader’s tomb”. Maybe he should spend less time at the Cheesecake Factory and more time on the economy. Because it’s a mess.
And that’s just the point. Trump has made our lives harder. But instead of trying to fix his own policies, he’s more interested in defending his fragile ego. That’s the leader of the American people right now.
President Trump has put himself ahead of the American people. And he has gutted nearly every check on his power. Except one. Our right to vote. He has tried to discredit these midterms, but they’re still the clearest verdict on his presidency.
That “starts with you,” as Obama rightly put it. We need leaders that care about the people they serve. That’s why we need you to go out and vote.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
More than 19 million Americans have already returned mail ballots for next week’s midterms, despite Trump’s push to restrict and discredit them. According to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, over 60 million mail ballots had been sent out or requested as of Wednesday. Trump signed an executive order this year to block mail ballots from going to anyone not on government voter lists. The Supreme Court struck it down last month after voting rights groups and Democratic-led states sued. The president’s efforts to discredit them have had a minor impact. Mail voting is still well below its 2020 peak. And Democrats appear to be the ones pulling back. In Pennsylvania, Democratic mail ballot requests are down 14 percent from 2022; Republican requests are up 19 percent. That shift may not hurt Democrats though. Mail ballots are rejected far more often than in-person votes. In fact, more than half a million were tossed in 2024 alone. University of Florida election expert Michael McDonald argues Trump may have actually turned thousands of would-be rejected Democratic ballots into in-person votes that count.
At least nine of Trump’s 15 cabinet secretaries have been formally accused of breaking the Hatch Act while campaigning for Republicans this fall. The 87-year-old law bars executive branch employees from campaigning in their official capacity. Watchdog groups say officials like Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy, and Howard Lutnick crossed that line by tying endorsements to their departments’ work. The administration says the complaints are politically motivated. A Pentagon spokesman said Hegseth’s appearances were “thoroughly vetted and cleared by lawyers.” But the office that enforces the law has gone quiet. In fact, Trump fired its head weeks into his second term. And just last month, it declined to censure anyone despite receiving more than 1,000 complaints during the 2025 shutdown.
