Hey everybody. Welcome back. Thanks for being here. And thanks to Conor for holding it down yesterday.
Our top story today. There appears to be a plague outbreak in Russia, and the Kremlin is trying to cover it up. One lab worker is dead, Russian media say a second person has died, and nearly 200 people have been quarantined. Russia is handling it the way Russia handles everything. Deny, deny, deny and delete anything that says otherwise. And here at home, the people in charge of keeping this away from us have spent years dismantling our public health system and installed unqualified loyalists to run what’s left.
We’ll also get into Trump backing down on the taxpayer-funded ads, Thom Tillis calling his vote for Pete Hegseth the biggest regret of his career, the White House kicking Politico off Air Force One, and the under-the-radar opening Democrats have to flip statehouses this November.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Russia Covers Up a Plague Outbreak
Here’s what we know. A 28 year old researcher at a plague research institute in Siberia died on October 2nd. Local reports say she broke a test tube in the lab. Russian officials deny that. They say she died of pneumonia of unknown origin and that no plague bacteria turned up in her samples.
But the hospital ward where she died was sealed off over a “particularly dangerous infection.” Nearly 200 of her contacts are quarantined in the hospital. Daycare workers are getting protective gear. Russian news stories about it have been disappearing from the internet. And this morning, local Russian media are reporting a second death at a district hospital in the region, with the same illness.
Pneumonic plague is the one form of plague that spreads person to person, through the air. Untreated, it’s almost always fatal. Most people will survive with antibiotics, but it needs to be caught early. Europe hasn’t seen a case in more than 50 years, and the EU says it’s watching this very closely. But because of the war in Ukraine, European health officials can’t just pick up the phone and call Moscow. Those channels are gone. So like the rest of the world, they’re leaning on the World Health Organization to find out what’s actually happening.
And as a reminder, Trump pulled the United States out of the WHO on his first day back in office. Here’s what he said when he was asked about the outbreak:
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t come away from that feeling reassured.
Look, hopefully this turns out to be nothing. But we need to keep a close eye on it, because this is Russia. They lie about everything. Covering up a leak like this is exactly what you’d expect them to do. What makes this one worse is that they’ve got a friend in the White House now, a president who seems to take Putin’s word over just about anyone else’s.
And you can hear it in how he talks about it. When it was COVID, there wasn’t a day Trump wasn’t out there calling it the China virus. But now that it’s Russia, it’s “we’ll help them.”
And if that’s not enough reason to be concerned, think about who’d be protecting us if this spirals out of control. RFK Jr. is running the health department, and the CDC has been gutted and its top people pushed out. During COVID, Trump at least had some serious people around him, career scientists who’d spent their whole lives preparing for exactly that moment. And look how that went. Now imagine how it goes with the unserious clowns he’s put in charge this time.
2. GOP Backlash Forces Trump to Back Down
Twice last week we covered Trump’s shameless use of taxpayer money for a flood of political ads. There was the creepy “Love Me” ad. There was even a spot recycled from Trump’s 2024 campaign. Almost all of them focused on Trump himself, and Trump personally directed his budget director to run them.
The administration tried to defend the blatantly partisan ads by comparing them to PSAs other presidents used to communicate policy changes or rally the country in wartime. The argument was so pathetic that even Republicans cried foul. For once, it was enough.
Here’s Trump waving the white flag on Truth Social: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A, and paying for them with U.S.A money.” So he’s decided, in his words, to do the “Patriotic Ads” and “pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.”
First of all, this is basically an admission of guilt. The White House is stubborn. If they really thought they were right, they wouldn’t back down. More to the point, if a super PAC is paying for the ads, it’s not really Trump’s money. It’s money people donated for political purposes. If the ads weren’t political, MAGA Inc. wouldn’t spend donor money on them in the first place.
In any case, Trump’s retreat comes too late. DHS signed a 20 million dollar contract for the campaign, and it’s already burned through millions of dollars. There’s been no word of a refund. Ironically, this was money allocated to Customs and Border Protection. Border security may be Trump’s bread and butter, but nothing comes before his own image. Remember that the next time he calls Democrats soft on the border.
Long story short, the president got caught using border security money to put himself on TV. Then he called in a super PAC to take over. That’s a start, I guess. But a better idea would be giving the American people their money back.
3. Tillis Calls Hegseth Vote His Biggest Regret
The retiring Republican Senator from North Carolina has a book out this week: “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents.” In the book, Tillis walks a fine line. He shares some concerns about Trump’s rhetoric without denouncing him outright, talking about things like checks and balances and executive meddling in primaries. But when it comes to the cabinet members he helped confirm, he’s pretty blunt. Here’s Tillis on 60 Minutes:
Tillis especially regrets his deciding vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. Troubled by reports about Hegseth’s drinking and treatment of women, he apparently agonized over the vote, and spent hours on the phone with the White House and Hegseth himself. He calls his eventual vote the biggest regret of his career, blames Hegseth for ignoring military advice to quit while he was ahead in Iran, and calls for his resignation.
He also claims to regret voting for RFK Jr., citing the outbreaks and vaccine nonsense we’ve been covering on this show for months.
Look, the red flags were obvious to everyone when Tillis cast these votes, so I don’t think he gets any real credit here. No one expected a Fox News host and a health conspiracy theorist to make good cabinet members. Tillis himself probably didn’t. But he held his nose and stayed loyal. Trump ran him out of the Senate five months later anyway.
4. Trump Bars Politico From Air Force One
Three weeks ago Trump tried to ban three news outlets from the White House. The outlets sued. And it didn’t take long for a judge to order the White House to restore their access. All the while, the press pool boycotted his coverage, leaving Trump soundlessly miming words over the whir of helicopter blades.
Now Trump is taking that measure a step further. Outlets have historically taken turns traveling with the president, sharing updates with other news organizations. Yesterday it was Politico’s turn. But the White House blocked it from traveling aboard Air Force One for the president’s planned trip to Nebraska. Their excuse is that the judge’s ruling only applies to the White House, not to Air Force One.
And if this sounds familiar, it should. Two days after the judge’s ruling, the White House pulled the same move on CNN.
But here’s the kicker. The White House offered Politico’s seat to other outlets. They said no. One after another, they refused to take a colleague’s spot. So Trump flew to Nebraska without a print reporter on Air Force One. For a man who desperately needs attention, that is yet another painful blow to his ego.
And remember what Trump promised at his inauguration:
Not that anybody believed him, but Trump promised to end government censorship and the persecution of political opponents. Instead, his second term has delivered both.
Time and again, the president has abused the First Amendment with one objective in mind: to silence the voices of his critics, and embolden those of his delusional supporters. Politico isn’t the first victim of his repressive campaign, and it certainly won’t be the last.
5. Republicans Brace for Statehouse Losses
We’ve spent weeks covering races for the House and the Senate. How Democratic candidates are running competitive campaigns in deep red territory. And how Republicans are stumbling on the defensive.
But these high-profile races aren’t the only ones on the ballot. The Washington Post analyzed every state with a simple question: which party could win the governorship and both state chambers? That would amount to unified control, often called a trifecta.
The Post found a lopsided political map. Democrats could break up Republican trifectas in as many as six states. And the party could win full control in as many as seven. Republicans, on the other hand, could only break Democratic control in two states, and win control in five.
At the state level, the Democratic Party is on the offensive almost everywhere. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee knows it. Its president said in a statement that “2026 is proving to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Democrats to shift the balance of power away from Republicans.”
And even their GOP counterparts are admitting it. The Republican State Leadership Committee referred to this year’s election as a “political environment that is likely to be one of the most challenging for state Republicans in recent years,” adding that their strategy involved a “defensive-first posture.”
While these races rarely make headlines, they sometimes matter more than the battle for Congress. When one party holds a trifecta, it is able to set priorities affecting large aspects of life and business without check from the opposition. That includes redistricting, education, and taxes. And with Congress stuck in gridlock, more of those decisions are landing on the states.
Republicans have had the upper hand here for years. They won the statehouses in 2010 and never really gave them back. But this is the first year in a long time where Democrats have a real chance to take some of it back.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Trump’s allies are working to push AI safety nonprofits out of the job of auditing AI companies. The fight centers on last week’s accord between Trump and top AI CEOs, which calls for outside checks on whether AI systems behave as intended. Former White House AI adviser David Sacks wants the nation’s biggest consulting firms to do that work instead. “In my view they should be professional auditors, not these NGOs,” he said on his podcast. A White House official said the administration supports groups that evaluate AI safety and security. But another administration official told the Post there has been a deliberate push to warn about effective altruism, the movement many of these nonprofits grew out of. On Sunday, Trump named Sacks and Pentagon tech chief Emil Michael to his new Super Intelligence Force advisory panel. Michael has said AI extinction warnings promote “extinction, death-cult-like philosophies.” The pressure is already working. After Sacks attacked Anthropic’s ties to the nonprofit METR, Anthropic announced it would partner with Accenture to build a team of outside evaluators.
Former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is joining Fox News. The network announced Monday that she’ll start Nov. 1 as an on-air contributor across both news and opinion shows. Leavitt left the White House in August to spend more time with her young children. She was the youngest press secretary in history and one of Trump’s most combative defenders at the podium. Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott said Leavitt’s White House experience gives her “a distinct understanding of today’s political landscape.” Leavitt promised to bring “the unique perspective and candor that defined my tenure.” She’s the third Trump press secretary to land at Fox, after Kayleigh McEnany and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The pipeline also runs both ways. Trump filled his cabinet with Fox personalities like Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy and Mehmet Oz. Yet Trump spent last week attacking the network, posting that “MAGA, and REAL Patriots, will never like Fox!” Fox also pulled Maria Bartiromo off the air last month, partly because she tipped off a Trump adviser that the network wouldn’t cover his latest stolen-election claims.
