Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today. We just got our first real look inside ICE’s deportation operation, and it’s a lot bigger and a lot messier than anybody knew. The government’s own watchdog found tens of millions of dollars wasted on detention space that was never used. And while it may seem like ICE’s crackdown was losing steam, new reporting this week shows it’s actually been surging. They’ve just been hiding it.
We’ll also get into Trump rolling out the red carpet for Xi Jinping, the White House finally bending under midterm pressure, Senate Republicans blocking one last Iran war vote, and the ad your tax dollars just paid for.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Watchdog Finds ICE Wasted Millions on Empty Detention Space
Last year, Congress gave ICE a whopping 45 billion dollars to expand detention. The agency clearly didn’t know how to handle all that cash. When the GAO followed the money, they found waste around every corner. Millions spent on tents that were never used. Pricey warehouses that are still sitting empty.
ICE can’t even figure out how to spend the money it hasn’t blown. They told GAO they would have a plan for their newfound fortune by next August. That’s almost a year from now.
It’s a good thing this report came out. ICE has been flying under the radar lately, even as arrests have surged. As the New York Times reports, the discrepancy is by design.
In recent months, ICE has shifted its whole strategy. Instead of big raids in one city at a time, enforcement is now spread out across the country. Officers are working with local police in red states and ignoring sanctuary laws in blue ones. They’re picking people up at laundromats, traffic stops, and even in hospital rooms.
Governors in some of those blue states have pushed back, saying ICE is blatantly violating their laws while threatening them at the same time. Here’s Tom Homan, the man running this operation, when he was asked about those objections.
That’s the guy in charge of the largest deportation operation in American history, not to mention a boatload of taxpayer dollars. And that’s how he talks about actual elected officials who have questions.
When Americans saw this operation up close back in January, they were horrified. They took to the streets. On every channel there was chaos and more news of officers acting like the rules didn’t apply to them. The White House took a beating, and ICE took the hint. If people don’t like what they see, don’t let them see it. Spread it out. Move into the shadows. Stay away from the crowds and the cameras.
This is how an agency acts when it knows the American people aren’t on board. We’ll keep reporting on ICE. So keep listening, and don’t let them hide.
2. Trump Rolls Out Red Carpet for Xi
President Xi got the whole nine yards yesterday. A military honor cordon with F-22s and B-2s overhead. A review of the Rose Garden, which is now a patio. And a state dinner with Trump’s favorite tech toads. Xi even took home a bald eagle statue for his trouble.
But what really came out of the pageantry? Not much. The tariff truce got extended to January, but there was no lasting deal. Trump sidestepped questions on Taiwan, and Xi was similarly noncommittal on Iran.
In other words, on substance the summit was a nothingburger. But Trump’s treatment of Xi does tell you a lot about his twisted priorities. Even Republican senators were bothered. Listen to Thom Tillis on CBS:
I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a president who finds more in common with despots than democratic leaders. War criminal Putin gets invited to the G20. The leader of our greatest adversary, a man Trump himself accuses of election meddling, sails through an easy summit in Washington. Autocrats get wined and dined while leaders like Zelensky get ambushed and chided. Ukraine is the most egregious example of the contrast, but there are others too. Does Trump give the same reception to Japanese or Korean leaders, the ones who deal with Chinese aggression every day? Of course he doesn’t.
That contrast is also highlighted by Trump’s attacks on the press. While PRC propagandists were roaming the White House grounds, we had American reporters fighting for their press badges.
The real source of Trump’s admiration for figures like Xi is jealousy. He wishes he could freeze out the media just like the PRC does without some pesky court getting in the way. Spending time with dictators lets him indulge in that fantasy. And he’s doing it more and more, because the reality at home is getting worse.
3. White House Lets Candidates Ditch Trump
For months, the West Wing has been pushing candidates to run on Trump and promising retribution for anyone that does otherwise. If you listen to this show, you know those threats have flopped. Candidates all across the map have been running from Trump for a while now.
Things are so bad that even the White House is acknowledging reality. Politico reports that Trump’s team is finally giving candidates in tough spots room to distance themselves. Where the base is still loyal, it’s also deploying the president to rally MAGA voters and stop the bleeding.
That bleeding is happening in some pretty shocking places. Take Florida, for example, supposedly a MAGA firewall. A GOP official put it simply: we are hemorrhaging. Trump won the state by 13 points two years ago, but that doesn’t matter anymore. This is a national phenomenon.
Florida was once a battleground state, but even places that haven’t voted blue in 50 years are on Trump’s itinerary. Next week, he’s holding rallies in Oklahoma and Alabama. There’s not even a competitive race in Alabama. A republican president only goes there five weeks before an election when his party wants to hide him from swing voters by any means necessary.
Senators especially are feeling the heat. Axios reports that the Senate Republican campaign arm is begging donors for millions of dollars to defend three red seats that weren’t on anyone’s list six weeks ago. This is what it looks like when an entire party panics.
4. Republicans Campaign Against a War They Just Voted to Continue
Yesterday the Senate voted on a resolution to end the war with Iran. It failed, 49 to 50. Four Republicans broke ranks. Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Thom Tillis. Every other Republican voted no. That was the last vote on this before November, and the twelfth resolution like it to fail since February.
Now, on its own that’s not surprising. What’s surprising is how many of these same Republicans are out on the campaign trail saying the opposite. The Washington Post found vulnerable GOP candidates who once backed the war are now running against it.
There is no better example of this discrepancy than Jon Husted. On Tuesday the Ohio senator, who’s up for reelection, told Politico the war needs to end as quickly as possible. On Thursday he voted to keep it going.
And that in a nutshell is how the Republican party is operating right now. Tell you what you want to hear, then do what daddy Trump wants. And hope nobody calls you out on it.
5. Trump Uses Your Tax Dollars to Buy an Ad About Himself
Starting Wednesday, an ad began airing on Fox News and other cable news outlets. It’s thirty seconds of your worst nightmare.
Trump vows to defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America. Fast cuts from MAGA rallies build into bold claims about the president’s successes, from “largest tax cuts in history” to “defending law and order and police.” Don’t worry, I won’t make us watch it.
One thing that sticks out is a refrain that plays over and over: “love me.” It sounds desperate and dictatorial at the same time. And that’s no accident. Trump keeps breaking record lows in his approval rating, week after week, without a convincing record to turn it around. So the ad goes straight to a simple demand: Love me, or else.
And now the worst part. A well-hidden detail at the end of the ad: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” That’s right. Your government is promoting its own president. And yet again, Trump is blurring the lines of legality.
Federal law bans spending taxpayer money on what the statute calls publicity or propaganda. The government’s own auditors have long read that to include ads that exist to make the president look good. Which is exactly what this ad does.
Regardless of questions about legality, the Atlantic called the ad what it is: a self-serving public service announcement. The president knows he has lost the public’s support, but he also knows that he can’t earn it back with such an abysmal record. So he’s reaching into your pocket to try and buy it back.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says that his government has spent the past year preparing for U.S. military invasion and planning cuts to its economic dependence. Carney called preparations for U.S. military action “just risk management” of an “extreme tail risk”. and said planning for it is “just risk management.” He also laid out a plan to cut Canada’s dependence on American technology. That includes moving off Elon Musk’s Starlink and weighing Sweden’s Saab Gripen fighter against a planned order of 88 F-35s. Trade talks between the two countries collapsed in late August, and both sides have traded rounds of tariffs since. Carney says he still talks with Trump often and wants potash added to any revived deal. Canada supplies almost 90 percent of the potash the U.S. imports. Earlier this week, Trump said he’d rather buy it from Belarus, a Russian ally under U.S. sanctions for its role in the war in Ukraine.
A new NewsGuard audit found that leading AI chatbots cite partisan “pink slime” sites posing as nonpartisan local news in 48 percent of their answers about midterm candidates and issues those sites cover. Only one of 168 responses flagged a source as partisan. ChatGPT cited the sites most often, at nearly 71 percent, followed by Copilot and Perplexity at 54 percent and Claude at 50 percent. Grok came in lowest at 29 percent. Microsoft was the only company to respond. A spokesperson said Copilot is “designed to ground answers in high-quality search results” and encourages users to review its sources. Left-leaning sites were cited three times as often as right-leaning ones, though NewsGuard attributes that to their far higher publishing volume rather than chatbot bias. Networks on both sides have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars this year promoting their stories on Facebook and Instagram. NewsGuard now counts 1,179 pink slime sites in the U.S., compared to 937 remaining daily newspapers.
