Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and let’s be honest — today I was tempted to go for the champagne.

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The Three Hardest Wins in America

First, I want to celebrate our core victory: America’s democracy survived, and is growing back.

Trump’s election in 2024 was the product of COVID-era inflation. It was not a validation of his corrupt, despicable politics.

Tuesday’s vote also showed that billionaires can be beaten at the ballot box. Elon Musk spent $212 million in Texas, and James Talarico won by 12 points.

I know it might sound premature, but after Tuesday, I have faith in America again.

Let’s start in Mississippi.

Scott Colom was born on Christmas Eve 1982 into a family that already knew what it meant to be first. His mother, Dorothy, was the first Black person ever elected to the chancery court in her district. His father was a lawyer who worked for Ronald Reagan and ran for state treasurer as a Republican.

In his twenties, Colom went to law school in Wisconsin. At 32, he became the first Black district attorney ever elected in a majority-white district in Mississippi. He’s still a member of the same Baptist church he grew up in. When a sheriff in his own district — a fellow Democrat — abused his office, Colom was the one who brought in the feds.

In 2023, President Biden nominated him to the federal bench. Mississippi’s other Republican senator, Roger Wicker, said yes. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith said no.

So he ran against her, and won. Scott is a seventh-generation Mississippian.

Mississippi hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1982. When it’s called, Colom will be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Then there’s South Carolina.

Annie Andrews moved to South Carolina in 2009 to work at Charleston’s children’s hospital. She spent nearly twenty years there, often as the doctor on the floor when a kid was hospitalized.

There she sometimes found kids who’d shot themselves with a gun they’d found at home. After the Parkland school shooting, she stopped being able to leave that at work. So she joined Moms Demand Action and started researching how doctors can talk to parents about locking up guns.

In 2025, RFK Jr. took over the nation’s health agencies. South Carolina, a state that never expanded Medicaid, became the epicenter of a measles outbreak, with nearly a thousand cases.

That was it for her. “No one recruited me to run,” Andrews said. She quit her job in June to campaign full-time, a mom of three public-school kids living on protein bars and gas-station snacks.

Andrews will be South Carolina’s first female senator, and the first pediatrician in the chamber’s history. In her victory speech, she said the win belonged to the teachers and the veterans she’d met in every corner of the state.

And then Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

Adam Hamilton grew up in the Kansas City suburbs in a family that rarely went to church. He found religion as a teenager, and married his high-school sweetheart, LaVon, a week after graduation. In 1990, when they were 25, the two of them started a church with four people — themselves and their two little girls — meeting in the chapel of a funeral home.

Thirty-six years later, Church of the Resurrection is the largest United Methodist congregation in America. With 24,000 congregants Hamilton says are equal parts Republicans, Democrats and independents. He’s written thirty books, and prior to this race, he’d never run for anything.

Republican senator Roger Marshall’s answer was to let his allies brand him a heretic for suggesting non-Christians might get into heaven, and run an ad accusing him of protecting a pedophile.

Hamilton’s reply was that if Jesus were standing in front of them, Roger Marshall would call him woke too.

Kansas voters agreed. “This election is a rebuke of unkindness and cruelty in Washington,” Hamilton said Tuesday night.

Marshall conceded, saying, “I don’t have any answers.” For once, a Republican senator told the truth.

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The Gerrymander That Ate Itself

Last summer, “very stable genius” Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional map to try and squeeze out five more Republican seats. Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Missouri followed.

Texas’ Republican gerrymander rested on a single bet: that Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 would do it again.

Texas Republicans redrew the map to gain five seats. They ended up losing one.

Nationwide, Republicans targeted fifteen Democratic districts. They won two.

In North Carolina, the former House Speaker who led the state’s redistricting, Tim Moore, lost to a Democrat in the very district he drew for himself. And Richard Hudson, the chairman of the Republican House campaign committee — the man whose job was to hold GOP seats — lost his, in a district his party had drawn to be safe by eighteen points, to retired Army major Richard Ojeda.

In Missouri, voters threw out Republicans’ new map by 24 points.

Republicans tried to pick their voters. Voters picked back.

The Wins Nobody’s Covering

Missouri didn’t just reject the map.

For years, Missouri’s Republican legislature gutted whatever voters passed: Medicaid expansion, minimum wage laws and abortion rights. On Tuesday, voters passed Amendment 6, which makes the state’s citizen initiative a fundamental right.

Lawmakers can now only overturn a voter-approved law with 80 percent of both chambers and a public vote. It’s the strongest protection for direct democracy in the country, and it’s barely been mentioned.

In Virginia, voters restored voting rights for felons when they walk out of prison. Virginia had lifetime disenfranchisement for any felony, among the harshest in the nation. It’s over.

Virginia wrote the right to abortion into its constitution. Nevada did it too. Missouri Republicans tried to repeal the abortion amendment voters passed in 2024 and bundled it with a ban on care for trans kids; voters rejected both.

What Comes Next

The gavels change hands in January. This means subpoenas, and dramatic hearings on the Iran war they hid from you. More investigations into the Epstein files. Paramount’s disgusting media deal.

We’ll be there for every one of them.

If you haven’t yet joined as a paying subscriber, now’s the moment. I want you to be part of our vibrant community, making history happen. Today’s the day — I’m hoping you’ll join me right now.

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What I’ll remember from this week isn’t Washington. It’s a pastor in a funeral-home chapel, a pediatrician who couldn’t look away, and a prosecutor whose own senator tried to end his career.

The billionaires bought the networks because they thought you’d stopped paying attention.

But you were. I was counting on it.

I’m John Byrne. I hope you enjoyed this election. I’m looking forward to following these green shoots with you.

— John Byrne, Founder, Raw America & Raw Story

P.S. If this election matters to you, share this newsletter today with someone who’d love to read it.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “panicked” and desperately “looking for a way out,” three separate sources inside the Defense Department tell Raw America.

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The panic set in after both the Washington Post and USA Today reported that Hegseth is not under consideration by incoming Tennessee governor Senator Marsha Blackburn to fill her Senate seat next year.

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Good morning. Happy Saturday! I’m John Byrne. Before we get going, tap that ❤️ and restack this newsletter. The votes are counted. Now the work of holding them accountable begins, and every share helps.

House Republicans are pissed that Trump promoted Stephen Miller, who they blame in part for losing Congress. A Newsmax host watched Mitch McConnell freeze on camera and shouted that the senator is a vegetable. Democratic wins in Texas, Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina have blown open the presidential map for the first time in a generation. And Ron DeSantis is preparing another White House run, this time against Trumpism.

Quick word before the news: Our subscribers who bet on independent journalism made this blue wave possible. In January, there will finally be subpoenas, and people who’ve spent two years avoiding questions will finally face the cameras. With your support, our White House and Capitol Hill reporters will be in the room where it happens, but we need to reach our subscription goals to ensure we can keep them there. Now that we’ve won, take the next step and subscribe today. I want you to be a part of our growing community. None of this is possible without you.

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House Republicans in ‘Utter Disbelief’ as Trump Promotes the Man They Blame for Losing Congress

House Republicans had a message for the White House on Friday: fire Stephen Miller. Hours later, Trump promoted him.

Miller is replacing Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. But multiple House Republicans told Fox News that Miller should be gone, in interviews conducted just moments before Trump announced the promotion.

“Horrible decision,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) said once the news landed.

Another GOP lawmaker, speaking anonymously, said members were in “utter disbelief.” Asked about the promotion, one simply replied with a facepalm emoji.

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Today, it’s been revealed that Donald Trump was reportedly so furious with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles after Republicans got humiliated in the midterms that she offered her resignation on the spot, clearing a path for outed white nationalist Stephen Miller to move into the role. Ohio’s Democratic Governor-elect, Amy Acton, says she has no plans to speak to her defeated Republican opponent Vivek Ramaswamy after he exploited her childhood sexual abuse for an attack ad. A new analysis by the New York Times finds that Democrat Mary Peltola is likely to win Alaska’s nail-bitingly close Senate race, while also poking a huge hole in one of Trump’s favorite go-to claims. And Ivanka Trump’s birthday party in Morocco was partially paid for by American taxpayers to the tune of almost $100,000.

Before we get started: the election is over, but the real fight is just beginning. The MAGA billionaires like Elon Musk who tried and failed to buy the midterms are now about to spend untold sums in the battle for your mind. That means rampant disinformation on social media and even more media consolidation. Independent media outlets like Raw America not beholden to any oligarch will become more important than ever over the next few years.

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Miller’s Promotion Came After Susie Wiles Offered Resignation to ‘Furious’ Trump

A new report illustrates just how ugly things got in Donald Trump’s White House as Tuesday’s midterm results rolled in.

According to CNN’s Kristen Holmes, the president was so angry with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles after Republicans’ humiliating defeat that Wiles offered her resignation. That news broke Friday not long after Trump announced on Truth Social that deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller — an outed white nationalist who was the chief architect of his most cruel immigration policies — would take over as chief of staff on Monday.

Holmes reported that Trump had been “furious with Susie since the election losses.” Various allies and advisors had been repeatedly calling the president and urging him to make staffing changes at the senior level. Holmes said Trump’s outburst toward Wiles happened in full view of multiple people, and that Wiles offered to leave her position after being publicly berated.

This is a significant turnaround from just two weeks ago, when Trump dismissed speculation that Wiles was headed for the exits. Holmes recalled Trump telling her his chief of staff would be “by my side for a very long time.”

Holmes said Wiles had become known as the one constant force who had successfully kept a lid on the chaos that defined the president’s first term, and as a key member of his braintrust for the past six years. She also said Wiles was perhaps the only person who could protect the president from of his own “worst instincts.”

Now, that guardrail appears to be totally gone with Stephen Miller now officially the most powerful man in the White House outside of Trump for the next two years. Americans should brace themselves.

Acton Says She Has No Plans to Speak to Ramaswamy After ‘Beyond the Pale’ Ad

In Ohio, Democratic Governor-elect Amy Acton is making it clear she’s not extending an olive branch to the Republican opponent she just dispatched.

In a Friday appearance on CBS Mornings, Acton told host Gayle King she has no plans to have a conversation with Trump-endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy after he ran an ad that featured her estranged mother, Donna Arthur. Acton said the ad was both “terrible and despicable.”

The background behind the ad is what makes it so disturbing. Acton hasn’t spoken to her mother in decades. In the late 1970s, Donna Arthur lost custody of both of her children after defending her husband, Cledith Arthur, who was criminally charged with raping Acton when she was a young girl.

A grand jury indicted Cledith in July of 1978. He pleaded not guilty, then skipped town. He and Donna fled to Pennsylvania. He was a fugitive from the law until at least 1981. He died in 2004. Donna Arthur stayed married to him despite what he did to her daughter.

In Ramaswamy’s ad, Donna Arthur doesn’t mention the abuse allegations, but instead claimed her daughter “lied her entire life.” The ad was even criticized by some Republicans like current two-term Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Some in the GOP worried that Ramaswamy may have sunk his own campaign by deciding to air it and spend $4 million spreading it across all of Ohio’s media markets in the final weeks of the election cycle.

As it turns out, they were right. Ramaswamy lost to Acton by eight points Tuesday night, despite Ohio not electing a Democratic governor since Ted Strickland in 2006.

Acton told CBS that America can’t afford to normalize behavior like Ramaswamy’s, making it clear that the ad was “so beyond the pale.” She said she believes leaders’ words should carry weight and that accountability is necessary. She added that Republicans relied heavily on lies and hatred in their campaign against her, but took solace in the fact that despite more than $150 million spent in the electon, Ohio voters saw through the propaganda.

Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, also weighed in. He lamented that Ramaswamy “stooped to such a despicable low,” and said the attack revealed just how morally bankrupt Ramaswamy really is.

These are the kinds of stories that the outlets owned by far-right oligarchs like David Ellison won’t cover. But because Raw America doesn’t answer to a wealthy owner, we can bring these stories directly to your inbox twice a day, every day. If that matters to you, will you chip in to keep this work going?

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Analysis Finds Democrat Mary Peltola Likely to Win Alaska Senate Race

In Alaska, the Senate race has yet to be decided and it may take weeks to count all remaining votes. However, a new analysis is offering a promising outlook for Democrats.

Both incumbent Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan and Democratic challenger Mary Peltola each sent out messages claiming they’ll ultimately prevail once every ballot is counted and ranked-choice preferences are accounted for. But the New York Times’ own analysis from the New York Times suggests the math favors Peltola.

The Times’ independent analysis also undermines one of Trump’s main talking points about the Alaska race. Last month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Alaska’s Division of Elections to block certification if Sen. Sullivan fell short, arguing that he would have won were it not for a candidate on the ballot with the same name — Daniel J. Sullivan — confusing voters. But a federal judge threw that lawsuit out last week.

According to the Times, Peltola was the second choice for most of Daniel J. Sullivan’s voters who ranked him first on their ballots, meaning she’ll pick up their votes once he’s eliminated from the full count. This means those voters weren’t actually confused at all about who they were voting for. Trump is still nonetheless demanding that Alaska hand over all of Daniel J. Sullivan’s votes, along with those of an entirely different fourth candidate, to Sen. Sullivan, despite the proposal having no basis in law, let alone any historical precedent.

As of this morning, Peltola was slightly leading the first-round count of ballots by roughly 600 ballots with 48.2 percent of the statewide vote. Her campaign says early in-person votes and absentee ballots have been breaking her way at a margin of more than 56 percent. Sen. Sullivan’s campaign insists he needs roughly 49.5 percent of the remaining two-way ballots and has 49.8 percent so far.

There’s a particular irony to all of this: if Sen. Sullivan ends up getting reelected, he’ll owe it all to ranked-choice voting, which is the very same system Republicans tried to repeal with a 2026 ballot initiative. That repeal campaign appears likely to fail. And if Peltola wins, she could be either the 55th or 56th Democratic member of the U.S. Senate in the next session of Congress, depending on whether Democrat Scott Colom wins Mississippi’s Senate race, which is also shaping up to be a photo finish. Democrats have already flipped six Republican seats so far.

Ivanka Trump Billed Taxpayers Almost $100,000 for Her Birthday Party

Our last story tonight is about Donald Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka, and the luxurious birthday getaway that was partially funded by American taxpayers.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, Ivanka was seen in Marrakesh, Morocco, on October 29, the day before she turned 45. Federal records obtained by the paper show there were two Secret Service contracts for roughly $93,000 for agents to both secure and stay at a two five-star hotels ahead of the first daughter’s arrival.

That includes $59,543 for rooms at the Sofitel Marrakech and $33,457 for a Secret Service team to be stationed at La Mamounia, which has hosted well-known guests like Winston Churchill and the Kardashian family. Those figures don’t even account for Secret Service agents’ flights to and from each destination, meals, transportation or salaries.

Even though Ivanka herself isn’t an employee of the White House, she’s still entitled to her own Secret Service detail as a member of the president’s family. Moroccan outlet Le360 reported that Ivanka walked through Marrakesh’s old neighborhoods and and enjoyed a cuisine of traditional Moroccan food. Her trip ended in time for her to make it home for the midterms.

Ivanka Trump is worth an estimated $100 million, and that figure grows exponentially when factoring in the total net worth of her husband, Jared Kushner, who is worth more than $1 billion. She could easily reimburse taxpayers for her Morocco trip, particularly when millions of Americans are struggling to afford basic needs like food and fuel thanks to her father’s policies. The one silver lining in all of this is that for once, that money wasn’t spent at one of her father’s resorts.

On January 3, the next Congress will gavel into session and investigate the Trump administration for abuses like the ones documented in these stories. Raw America isn’t waiting until then to uncover what’s really going on in Washington. Our Capitol reporter, Luke De Cresce, has spent this week pounding the pavement in the Rayburn and Cannon buildings, meeting with staffers for both the top Democrats on the most influential committees, and with decision-makers for incoming members. Our White House reporter, Brian Karem, will soon be out with a new report revealing what his sources are saying about Trump’s embattled Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth.

This kind of shoe-leather journalism requires resources. And we need readers like you to step up to make sure we can be in the room asking the tough questions that other outlets won’t. Will you make today the day you officially join Raw America as a paying subscriber? You’ll be glad you did.

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent journalism. If you haven’t already, be sure to hit the ❤️ and restack this newsletter so these stories can reach the most people. Have a great weekend.

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Elon Musk spent almost a half-billion traceable dollars (and we have no idea how much “dark money” that’s not traceable but legalized by corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) to try to help rightwing politicians win this week’s election. As the old joke goes, that’s both the good and the bad news.

Given how severely great wealth has distorted our republic — from buying elections and legislation to putting judges on the Supreme Court — Democrats now face some serious decisions about how to proceed.

Who should lead the Party’s efforts both in and outside of Congress? Should the Party embrace its progressive base and push policies like Medicare for All and free college, or stay with Clinton-style “moderate” positions as we move into the next Congress? Impeach Trump or, as Schumer suggested yesterday, “work with him”?

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A federal judge just blocked construction of Donald Trump’s 250-foot arch just hours after a federal panel packed with his own appointees approved it. Trump’s other vanity projects across Washington are also likely done after the election of Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is now warning that their plans to build more data centers will now be much more difficult after the midterms. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla have both lost more than $450 billion in market value since Election Day.

Before the news, independent media needs your support. As you’ll read below, the tech billionaires are in full-on panic mode after the election, which is being widely viewed as a referendum on data centers and the AI industry. All the money they were spending on the midterms will now almost certainly be spent on influencing public opinion. That means they’ll be flooding every news outlet and social media platform with disinformation. And that means independent media outlets that don’t take their money will be a critical resource for people who want the real truth.

This is why we need you. Because we don’t have an oligarch propping us up, we’re counting on readers who believe in independent media to chip in so we can cover the stories the billionaires won’t. A paying subscription amounts to just 22 cents a day. That’s less than a cup of coffee a week. Will you step up today to keep independent journalism alive?

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Judge Halts Construction of Trump’s Arch After Panel of Trump Appointees Approved It

Let’s talk about triumphal arches. Roman emperors built them to celebrate conquering generals returning home from war. Napoleon built one in Paris to honor himself. America’s founders rightly rejected that kind of monarchical vanity after winning a war against a king. Apparently, Donald Trump slept through that part of history class.

On Thursday, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) — which is packed full of Trump appointees — green-lit construction of the proposed arch on Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery by a vote of 8-4 after a hearing to discuss it. The Trump administration pledged that work on the arch would start almost immediately after the hearing.

But on Thursday night, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — an appointee of former President Barack Obama — temporarily blocked construction despite the NCPC’s ruling. Her order officially bars any and all construction, excavation, demolition and road closures tied to the arch for at least two weeks while a legal challenge plays out.

That legal challenge was filed by Democratic attorneys general from both Washington, D.C. and Virginia, who sued on Halloween. They argue the arch is in violation of several environmental and historic preservation laws, would impede traffic for commuters and emergency responders at a major chokepoint between two jurisdictions and would block views between monuments. Chutkan combined their lawsuit with litigation filed by a group of Vietnam War veterans.

Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has claimed it has the right to build the arch under century-old law authorizing two columns near the Arlington Memorial Bridge. It also maintained that the arch was necessary for national security purposes, though Chutkan indicated she was unconvinced by that argument. In the order Chutkan handed down last night, the judge wrote that the administration’s “belated and unsupported assertion” of national security benefits had no impact on her decision.

This is merely the latest loss for Trump in a string of consecutive court defeats for Trump’s vanity projects in D.C. That includes courts striking down his attempt to rename the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself and against his $400 million White House ballroom (though the Supreme Court is allowing ballroom construction to move forward for now).

Back in 1789, a Senate committee wanted to officially refer to President George Washington “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties.” The House thankfully refused to go along with that, so the newly founded country decided to settle on simply calling him “Mr. President.” That argument was settled even before the ink on the Constitution was dry. It shouldn’t take a federal judge to remind the White House that in America, we don’t build monuments to men who are still holding office.

Trump’s Vanity Projects in DC Now in Limbo After Democrats Retake Congress

Court battles like the one that just played out over the arch are now about to get some serious backup in Congress. With Democrats now preparing to take over both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in January, the president’s hopes to remake the nation’s capital in his image are likely to hit quite a few more roadblocks compared to when Republicans were in charge of the legislative branch.

So far, it appears that Trump is plowing ahead undeterred. In his first public appearance after his party suffered historic losses at the polls, the president gave the press a tour of the White House ballroom construction and talked in depth about columns and steel beams. As reporters asked him about the new Democratic majorities, Trump would only say: “watch this beam go up.”

Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman of California, who will chair the House Natural Resources Committee in January, has spent more than a year investigating Trump’s vanity projects. In a letter asking members to officially get behind his bid for the chairmanship of the committee that oversees historical sites in D.C., Huffman said Democrats have been steadily pushing back against the president’s attempts to turn treasured public spaces into tacky tributes to himself. He also promised to use the committee’s gavel to investigative all wrongdoing.

Democratic Congressman Don Beyer of Virginia has also been a vocal critic of Trump’s various D.C. construction projects. Spokesman Aaron Fritschner observed out that Democrats will officially control the federal appropriations process in 2027, giving them actual leverage over what funds are spent on Trump’s projects. Fritschner also declared the new Democratic majority will reclaim the Constitutional power of the purse that outgoing House Speaker Mike Johnson ceded to the president.

Democracy Forward CEO Skye Perryman (who Raw America interviewed in June), whose group is representing several plaintiffs in those lawsuits, said that after the election, the American public now has a tool beyond the courts. She added that she expects Congress will now get back to its job of checking the executive branch, including by conducting public hearings on how these projects are actually being funded.

The costs still remain relatively unknown. The seawall alone at the East Potomac golf course Trump is aiming to renovate could cost more than $300 million. A federal judge in D.C. is now opening a formal investigation into whether White House attorneys violated ethics rules in defending the project.

The last time a president declared the Treasury was his own personal slush fund was Richard Nixon. Congress responded to executive overreach then by passing the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and took back the power of the purse. Spending power is the reason we have a legislature as spelled out in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. Come January 3, it’ll finally be back in the hands of people who ran on actually using it.

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Meta Warns Data Center Development Now Much Harder After Midterms

Democrats’ midterm rout is also reverberating in Silicon Valley. While addressing a Wall Street Journal tech conference this week, Meta president Dina Powell McCormick admitted that the new Democratic majorities will make data center construction much more difficult across the country.

Data centers were on the ballot this year across the country, and as Raw America reported this week, data center-related initiatives were defeated in 38 of 40 races. Communities in multiple states pushed back loudly against facilities reviled for drain local freshwater resources and driving up residents’ electricity bills. Powell McCormick acknowledged the AI industry has done an insufficient job communicating what it believes are the benefits of those projects, and said the backlash to data centers is deeply linked to how people feel about artificial intellience in general.

She told attendees that data centers are the visible face of the AI industry, and have become a physical symbol people can point to and say they don’t want built in their backyard. Meta is currently operating data centers in 23 states, with five of them — including one in Texas — planned at a gigawatt or more (enough to power a major city).

Meta’s president said that going forward, data center projects will face far more public input and will depend on whether local residents actually want them built. The company is pitching its facilities to voters by promising to pay for their own electricity, putting property tax surpluses toward funding for teachers and first responders, and to hire maintenance staff locally. Though whether voters will buy that is another question entirely.

Farmers in the 1870s had the same complaints with the railroads and the grain elevators. These were built by private monopolies that showed up without invitation, set whatever prices they wanted and chalked it all up to the progress of man. The Supreme Court responded forcefully in the Munn v. Illinois case, ruling that when a business is insisting on operating in the public interest, the public gets a say in how it runs. There’s nothing more public than the water we drink and the electricity that powers our homes.

Elon Musk’s Companies Lose Over $450 Billion After Election

To top off this morning’s news, no one is having a worse week than Elon Musk. Shares of his top companies, SpaceX and Tesla, dropped by roughly 9 percent and 11 percent on Thursday respectively, as investors fearing new congressional inquiries and tougher regulation sold off billions of dollars in shares. By the close of business Thursday evening, the two companies lost around $456 billion in combined market value since election night.

Musk was the single biggest donor to Republican candidates and affiliated groups in the 2026 campaign cycle, spending more than $470 million of his own money trying to influence races. Most of the candidates he backed lost by significant margins. In Texas, which houses both the Tesla and SpaceX corporate headquarters, Democrats James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa easily defeated longtime Musk allies Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott in the Senate and gubernatorial races, respectively.

Hinojosa campaigned on imposing a new moratorium on data centers until the legislature passes strict regulations on water use, electricity costs and more local control over data center projects. That’s a big problem for Musk, as his companies are currently in the midst of planning a sprawling data center and semiconductor complex called Terafab in Grimes County. He’s also building a supercomputer at SpaceX’s Starbase facility. Analysts with Deutsche Bank warned that SpaceX’s Texas computing plans may now get hit with delays and higher costs.

CNN is also reporting that both Musk and SpaceX have been instructed to preserve all documents pertaining to restrictions placed on a military version of his Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine. Those restrictions hampered Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russian attacks. Musk is still the richest man in the world, but his fortune has now slipped below $800 billion after briefly surpassing $1 trillion this summer.

Franklin Roosevelt had a name for people like Elon Musk back in 1936: economic royalists. He said these were people who assumed that owning the economy entitled them to ownership of the government as well. That fall, he famously told a packed Madison Square Garden audience that the economic royalists were unanimous in their hatred of him, and that he welcomed their hatred. Texans just sent the richest man on the planet the exact same message. Wall Street appears to have done the math before he did.

Here’s the truth: stories about Trump’s vanity projects being put on ice, and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk realizing they can no longer lord over Americans and ram data centers through against the will of the people are the kinds of stories the billionaire-owned cable networks and newspapers refuse to cover. But because Raw America isn’t bossed around by an oligarch with a Mar-a-Lago membership, we can bring these stories directly to your inbox every day.

Whether this work continues is entirely up to you. We can’t operate unless readers like you, who rely on and read our independent journalism every day, step up and chip in. Will you help us keep covering these important stories by becoming a paying subscriber right now?

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent journalism. If you haven’t yet, please be sure to hit the ❤️ and tap the restack button. Those two clicks are what help us reach the people who really need these stories.

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Tonight, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is apparently planning to resign from the Trump administration so he can run for president in 2028. Good luck shaking off the stink of MAGA. Harmeet Dhillon, the Republican attorney who ran the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division into the ground, apparently read the writing on the wall and handed in her resignation today, less than 48 hours after Republicans lost their majorities in Congress. Donald Trump is also trying to sneak Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth into the Senate in an attempt to give him a soft landing as Republicans blame the midterms on his cheerleading of the Iran war. And Mississippi Republicans are now plotting to throw out Democratic ballots in the Magnolia State’s razor-thin Senate race, which Democratic candidate Scott Colom is currently winning.

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Marco Rubio Reportedly Planning to Resign to Get Ready for 2028 Presidential Run

The Independent is reporting that Republican insiders and senior figures in the British government are expecting Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio to soon resign from the Trump administration in order to prep for an eventual campaign for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. That expectation came after Democrats handily won majorities in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, even flipping Republican strongholds like Kansas and Texas.

One unnamed ally of Rubio confided to the paper that the secretary of state desperately needs to “distance himself from the Iran war and pin that one on Trump,” and that he can’t run for president while he’s still serving as America’s top diplomat. Another anonymous GOP source predicted four or five members of the Trump Cabinet would soon be “running for the hills,” saying that nobody wants to stick around for the investigations and impeachment hearings that will most certainly begin in January once the new Democratic majorities are officially sworn in.

Vice President JD Vance is already trying to put some distance between himself and his boss. After Tuesday night’s results rolled in, Vance wrote a lengthy post arguing “the reason we lost is the [Iran] war,” and that Trump himself even said as much. Meanwhile, there’s mounting speculation that Trump may try to shackle his Pentagon chief with the blame for his war, and that he may try to throw Rubio and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles under the bus as well.

Rubio has experienced both sides of Trump. In 2016, the president mocked him on the debate stage as “Little Marco,” but last year gave him a level of power over U.S. foreign policy rivaled only by Henry Kissinger. Still, he’s been effectively sidelined on both Middle Eastern issues and the Ukraine war in favor of special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

And should Rubio run for the nation’s highest office, he’d almost certainly be relentlessly scrutinized over the bombings of boats in the Caribbean that have so far killed more than 200 people — which critics have described as extrajudicial executions — along with the Trump administration’s cozy relationship with Venezuela’s increasingly unpopular interim leader, Delcy Rodriguez. The White House responded to reports of Rubio’s purported plans by calling its journalists “glue-sniffing hacks.” That should tell you all you need to know about how this administration responds to legitimate questions.

Top Trump DOJ Official Resigns After Republicans Blowout Loss in Midterms

MAGA activist Harmeet Dhillon — the longtime Republican lawyer who Trump appointed to run the DOJ’s the Civil Rights Division — officially handed in her resignation to Attorney General Todd Blanche on Thursday. Blanche heaped praise on her, saying she defended civil liberties “without fear or favor.”

Her record tells a vastly different story, to put it mildly. Under Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division refused to open a use-of-force investigation into ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot U.S. citizen Renee Good at point-blank range in Minneapolis this winter. Her office also 30 states plus Washington, D.C. in a largely futile effort to seize voter registration lists ahead of the election. Federal judges threw out 27 of those cases.

Dhillon also unsuccessfully failed to convince a grand jury to indict former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. And Dhillon’s prosecutors were also responsible for bringing criminal charges against journalist Don Lemon for covering an ICE protest at a Minneapolis church.

Stacey Young of Justice Connection described Harmeet Dhillon as “the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history.” Kristen Clarke, who former President Joe Biden picked to lead the Civil Rights Division and now serves as general counsel of the NAACP, said Dhillon “destroyed the crown jewel of the Justice Department.” Young is now calling on the incoming Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate to use its full constitutional powers to make sure whoever comes next won’t follow in her footsteps.

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Trump Considering Move to Send Pete Hegseth from Pentagon to Senate

No one in the Trump administration is under more pressure than his Pentagon chief. Despite Trump’s continued insistence to the public that Pete Hegseth isn’t going anywhere, the president is now reportedly considering a move that would take Hegseth out of the Defense Department and send him to the U.S. Senate as more Republicans blame Hegseth for the Iran war.

Former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri told MS NOW that Trump could feasibly convince Republican Tennessee Governor-elect Marsha Blackburn to appoint Hegseth to the Senate seat she just vacated. Blackburn is reportedly waiting until after January 3 — when the next Congress gavels into session — to appoint her replacement.

It isn’t just McCaskill who is saying this: New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman is also reporting that Trump is considering dumping Hegseth as a way to extend an olive branch to Democrats. When reporters asked the president if he was seriously considering the move, Trump demurred, but maintained Hegseth would “be very popular” in the Senate. He later told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that he was planning on keeping Hegseth in his role, though he admitted he’s been getting more calls about his Pentagon chief’s future.

Blackburn’s office is pushing back on the rumor. Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman tweeted that an unnamed source close to the governor-elect isn’t considering Hegseth for the vacant seat, adding the story was “nothing more than Washington, D.C., spin from a bunch of consultants with nothing better to do.” The source added that Blackburn “is focused on the transition, not entertaining baseless speculation,” and that “D.C. won't pick the next senator.”

There’s also a timing issue in that outgoing Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky and several others are hoping Trump will move fast so a GOP-controlled Senate can still confirm his replacement before Democrats take back the gavel on January 3. Trump also has a pattern of shuffling around people in his administration instead of outright firing them, as he did with United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz. In the wake of the Signalgate scandal in 2025, Trump transitioned Waltz out of his role as National Security Adviser job and moved him to the UN amid calls to fire him.

Mississippi GOP Launches Effort to Throw Out Democratic Ballots in Senate Race

Finally, in Mississippi, Republicans are pulling out all the stops to prevent what could be the biggest upset of the midterms.

In the Magnolia State, Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Scott Colom is currently leading incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by around 1,800 votes as of this writing, with a looming certification deadline of Friday, November 13. Now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is demanding that Mississippi county election officials “separate and preserve” all affidavit ballots — which voters cast when there are issues at the polls with their voter ID.

Here’s what makes that such a big deal: Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson flagged some 230,000 voter registrations as “inactive” earlier this year, which forced massive numbers of Mississippi voters to cast affidavit ballots. Those are counted after Election Day, once voters show acceptable ID. There are still thousands of affidavit ballots that have yet to be added to the count, with most of them coming from the Democratic stronghold of Hinds County, which houses the capital city of Jackson. And because Mississippi has no recount law in place for federal races, a losing candidate’s only option is to challenge whether certain ballots will ultimately be added to the official statewide count.

Mississippi Republican Party chair Mike Hurst vowed that his party is prepared to “act swiftly.” The Hyde-Smith campaign insists the senator win another term once every “legally cast” ballot is counted. That particular phrasing could signal a potential legal challenge to certain ballots. Colom is urging supporters to make sure their ballots are verified and counted, while promising to protect the integrity of the election.

This effort is part of a pattern we’ve already seen before from the Trump Justice Department. The administration tried to stop California from counting nearly 21,000 ballots in the midterms, and also unsuccessfully attempted to block certification in Alaska’s Senate race. Both of those efforts failed in court. Litigation over similar demands in Washington state is still ongoing.

You won’t find stories like these — in which the president’s once-devoted close aides are jumping off the sinking ship and Republicans are pulling out every dirty trick they can think of to stop a deep-red state from electing a Democrat — in the lead block of David Ellison’s CBS Evening News or on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox. Raw America can cover these stories precisely because we don’t take orders from a billionaire with a Mar-a-Lago membership. We answer exclusively to our readers and that won’t ever change as long as we can help it.

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Today, top Democrats are rolling out their plans to subpoena the CEOs and the big law firms that rolled over for Donald Trump once the new majorities are sworn in this coming January. The Trump White House is quietly beefing up its legal team in anticipation of a wave of investigations from Democrats. Outgoing Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky says he’s got enough votes from members of his own party to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during the lame duck session that gavels in next week. And after Democrats in five swing states won state government trifectas, they may now have the power to legislate the Electoral College completely out of existence without having to amend the Constitution.

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As you’ll read below, the MAGA billionaires and CEOs who spent the last two years bowing down to Trump are already gearing up for investigations. This could potentially include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk, whose algorithms are actively preventing Raw America’s stories from reaching our followers on those platforms. But by subscribing, you can make sure these stories come directly to your inbox, which the billionaires can’t touch. Will you make today the day you officially join as a paying subscriber?

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If you missed it, click here to watch our full interview from last night with Congresswoman Delia Ramirez of Illinois — the #2 Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee — in which she discussed her plans to subpoena top Trump administration officials.

Top Democrats Prepare to Subpoena CEOs and Law Firms That Bowed Down to Trump

Top Democrats in the House of Representatives set to retake committee gavels have lately been going through a 181-page dossier that names hundreds of CEOs and corporations they could investigate beginning in January. Think tank Groundwork Collaborative created the document, which was spearheaded by former staffers for Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

The dossier focuses on big tech companies, artificial intelligence firms, fossil fuel corporations, private prison operators, nursing home conglomerates and dozens of other major industries that the Groundwork Collaborative blames for the ongoing affordability crisis. The document makes the case for a relentless stream of televised public hearings in which corporate CEOs get dragged in front of major committees and face pressure to resign and/or pay restitution to consumers.

Some of the specific ideas laid out in the dossier include putting corporate landlords under oath to testify about squeezing tenants with junk fees. The document also makes the case for publicly grilling the heads of online sports gambling companies who are reportedly using AI to encourage users to engage in compulsive gambling. Groundwork is also calling for major grocery chains to disclose how they use the data they’ve mined from shoppers over the years.

Groundwork senior vice president Alex Jacquez is arguing that stories like Trump’s gifted jet from the Qatari royal family and his $400 million White House ballroom only motivate Democrats who are already fiercely opposed to the president. Jacquez instead wants the new majorities to be “laser-focused on the pain points and the corporations people blame for jacking up their prices.”

The plan is sparking debate, as centrist-leaning groups like the Progressive Policy Institute and Third Way believe that attacking corporations could potentially alienate voters ahead of the 2028 election and complicate Democrats’ argument to stay in power. The House Judiciary Committee’s incoming chairman, Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland, is also not sure about the effectiveness of targeting specific companies, and said the focus should instead be on “systems and networks of corruption.”

However, the dossier is still garnering attention from powerful lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren, who is set to chair the influential Senate Banking Committee, and Bernie Sanders, who will lead the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. Other progressive senators like Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island — who will chair the Judiciary Committee — and Ron Wyden — who will retake the Finance Committee’s gavel — could play a role in how much of the dossier’s plans get implemented.

In the House, Raskin is also setting his sights on the big law firms that cut deals with the Trump White House in early 2025. Those deals eliminated those firms’ pro bono work for immigrants, gutted diversity, equity and inclusion programs and paved the way for those firms to do hundreds of millions of dollars in free work to advance Trump’s goals.

Raskin has already sent official letters to the firms Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden, Paul Weiss, Latham & Watkins and several others requesting the full details on how those deals were negotiated. So far, none of them have complied. Raskin told MS NOW last night that those law firms “have basically surrendered and made all sorts of outrageous concessions.” He aims to use his new subpoena powers to compel them to testify before his committee.

There’s past precedent for this, and it proved successful. In 1933, investigator Ferdinand Pecora hauled J.P. Morgan and some of the most powerful bankers in America in front of the Senate Banking Committee. Those hearings didn’t just humiliate Wall Street, but paved the way for historic victories like the Glass-Steagall Act and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Televised oversight isn’t just theater for the cameras when it results in real progress.

Trump’s Team Quietly Bracing for Looming Congressional Investigations

Meanwhile, the Trump White House is publicly telegraphing a message of defiance. But behind closed doors, officials are apparently in a state of panic.

Four current and former Trump administration staffers recently told NBC News that the White House has been quietly prepping for Democratic investigations in Congress since well before the election. The office of the White House Counsel has been busy adding more staff and is scrambling to set up protocols on how to handle looming inquiries from Democratic-led House and Senate committees.

Current and former White House officials have also been lawyering up on their own. Some former Trump staffers are reportedly rejecting offers to work for the White House again because they’re leary of being grilled publicly on C-SPAN.

Democrats haven’t been subtle about their plans. Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia of California, who will chair the House Oversight Committee in January, posted a two-word statement on his social media channels after the House was officially called for Democrats: “Lawyer up.” Senator Wyden has a one-word statment of his own that simply read: “Subpoenas.” And House Homeland Security Committee vice-ranking member Delia Ramirez of Illinois — who will chair the committee’s subcommittee on oversight — posted to Bluesky that various Trump DHS officials should “clear your schedule.” Ramirez spoke with Raw America last night about her plans to subpoena former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, border czar Tom Homan and former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino if they don’t comply with her request to volunteer their testimonies.

Garcia has identified four key subjects for his own committee to pursue: Trump family’s moneymaking ventures; the backroom financial dealings between former Noem and senior advisor (and rumored paramour) Corey Lewandowski, corporate corruption and Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged co-conspirators. Wyden aims to probe the Trump administration’s drug pricing deals with Big Pharma, and Reuters is reporting that both Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric, could also be ordered to testify.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis dismissed Democrats’ efforts as “sham investigations.” An anonymous White House official ominously warned that Democrats should be aware that the Trump administration still controls federal agencies.

When it comes to impeachment, Democrats still have yet to come to a consensus. Even if the House impeached Trump for a third time, a conviction would require 67 votes in the Senate. Even if Democrats win their maximum potential of 56 seats, they would still need 11 Republican votes. When Trump was asked whether he was worried about another impeachment, he answered “not even a little bit.”

The White House may be able to hire an army of lawyers, but the Supreme Court already settled this fight nearly a century ago. In McGrain v. Daugherty — the Teapot Dome case from 1927 — justices handed down a unanimous ruling that Congress can’t legislate without the power to investigate. That means committee subpoenas are just as constitutional as the veto.

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Massie Says He Has Enough Republican Support to Impeach Hegseth Next Week

While Trump may have launched the war with Iran that helped contribute to Republicans’ blowout losses on Tuesday, plenty of people inside his own party are now eager to find a scapegoat. And right now, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in the hot seat.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky recently told CNN he’s aiming to force a vote to impeach Hegseth when Congress returns for its lame duck session next week. Multiple Republican sources say they expect the resolution to pass. That’s a significant development, as Republicans will still have control of the House of Representatives until January 3.

Several Republicans told the network that Hegseth vastly oversold how quickly and easily the United States would defeat Iran, and that he continued to escalate hostilities even as constant bombing failed to compel the Iranian government to surrender. Those same Republicans now say the war has become an unwinnable quagmire that’s worsened the cost of living crisis and turned voters against them. Even Vice President JD Vance recently posted a lengthy post-election statement arguing “the reason we lost is the war.”

One source close to the Trump White House said that Hegseth more than anyone should take responsibility for Tuesday night, accusing him of being “either dishonest or incorrect” about the Iran war’s timelines and goals from the very beginning.

Trump is still obstinately behind Hegseth. White House officials say the president is a personal fan of Hegseth, even telling him he’s “the best guy I have.” Trump maintains his defense secretary is doing a very good job, and he’s so far shown zero regret about launching the war that’s now dragged on for nearly nine months with no end in sight.

The Pentagon is also circling the wagons. Defense Department chief spokesman Sean Parnell said Hegseth won’t be sidelined by “phony investigations” and is committed to staying in his pos through the end of Trump’s second term.

Some in the president’s orbit are scoffing at Hegseth’s defiant attitude. One unnamed administration official said Hegseth likely knows his career is over but is angling for a dramatic exit so he can use as a springboard for a potential 2028 presidential run.

Massie is instead arguing that Republicans didn’t suffer staggering losses over any one single issue, and instead argued that the apocalyptic midterm results could have been avoided were it not for the GOP’s “cultish following of Donald Trump.”

There’s only ever been two Cabinet secretaries in American history who have ever been impeached. One was Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024, and the other ran the same agency Hegseth runs now. Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached by a unanimous House in 1876 over a corruption scheme, and he resigned from his position just hours before the actual vote. If Massie pulls this off, Hegseth joins a club of two.

Democrats Now Able to Legislate Electoral College Out of Existence

This last story might be the biggest long-term development to come out of Tuesday’s elections. Democrats may now be in a position to effectively end the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact commits member states to award their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. Since 2006, 19 states have signed on, adding up to 222 electoral votes. The compact only kicks in once it reaches 270.

On Tuesday, Democrats won full control of the legislature and governor’s office in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada. None of those states has joined the compact yet. If all five sign on, the total jumps to 283, which is more than enough.

That’s a big if, though. Michigan Democrats had a trifecta from 2023 to 2024 and didn’t pass it. Nevada’s Democratic governor vetoed it back in 2019, arguing it would weaken the state’s role in presidential races.

There’s also a constitutional wrinkle. The Constitution lets state legislatures decide how to appoint electors, but it also bars interstate compacts without the consent of Congress. A Democratic Congress could approve the compact, and in theory it wouldn’t need the president’s signature. But Democrats are well short of 60 votes in the Senate, and Republicans would almost certainly try to block it. That’s no surprise, given that four of the five presidents who won the White House while losing the popular vote were Republicans, Donald Trump in 2016 included.

Article II says each state appoints its electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” and James Madison himself told the Constitutional Convention that direct popular election was the fittest way to choose a president. The compact isn’t an end run around the Founders. It’s the Founders’ own language being used exactly the way they wrote it.

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Watch Raw America’s interview with Congresswoman Delia Ramirez below:

• Ramirez’s plans to formally request appearances from former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, border czar Tom Homan and former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, and to subpoena them if they refuse to appear

• The congresswoman’s response to presumptive incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries’ claim that voters don’t want Democrats to “get even”

• Her call for the new Democratic majority to pursue a two-pronged strategy of both accountability and affordability in the next Congress

• Why she believes Democrats are now in their strongest position in decades to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation

• Why Democrats shouldn’t allow the possibility of a Trump veto to get in the way of passing Medicare for All, a $25 minimum wage and immigration reform

• Whether congressional hearings in 2027 can seed potential “Nuremberg 2.0” trials under a future Democratic-led Department of Justice

• The importance of pursuing accountability for federal agents’ killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis

• How Democrats can learn the lessons of Reconstruction, and why this work is personal for Ramirez

Raw America doesn’t have a billionaire owner or a corporate parent keeping us afloat. Interviews like these — with a high-ranking member of Congress soon to chair the oversight subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee — are only possible because readers believe in independent journalism enough to fund it. If that matters to you, will you make today the day you step up to keep independent journalism alive?

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Ramirez Names First Targets for Potential Subpoenas

Gibson opened the conversation by asking Ramirez about a Bluesky post she published on election night, addressed to Noem, Miller, Mullin, Homan, and Bovino, telling them to clear their schedules, and asked her directly if she is planning to compel them to testify.

“Carl, I meant every single word on that Bluesky post, and I certainly know that Stephen Miller got the note because his wife made sure that he saw it,” Ramirez said, noting that Miller’s wife, Katie, personally replied to her post on X.

The three-term congresswoman laid out her agenda for the oversight subcommittee, explaining she wants a full investigation into “the corruption, the abuse of power, the immunity in which these agents have been operating under,” along with a full accounting of the DHS diverting FEMA appropriations to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and to deportation planes, and how Secretary Mullin has spent money that should have gone to the Transportation Security Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard.

She said if her initial requests for voluntary testimony get ignored, she’ll move forward with the subpoena process.

“We will formally subpoena every one of them,” Ramirez said. “I’m going to spend the first six months doing all of the investigation, all of the oversight work that Congress should have been doing on this agency that has been really an agency of terror for so many.”

Ramirez Pushes Back on Claim That Accountability Amounts to ‘Getting Even’

Gibson then asked Ramirez about a claim that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York made on Wednesday’s episode of Morning Joe on MS NOW that “the American people don’t want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf.” He asked whether Ramirez agreed that holding officials accountable amounts to getting even, and whether she would vote for Jeffries as speaker.

Ramirez first remarked that Gibson asked two questions and “snuck in the second [question] about the speakership”) but focused her answer on the first.

“This is not about getting even. This is not a tit for tat,” Ramirez said. “This is about justice and accountability.”

She pointed out that Congress has authority over every dollar spent by the government, and reminded the audience that the children of Silverio Villegas González — who was killed during ICE’s crackdown in the Chicago — are now wards of the state of Illinois.

“I don’t get to look at Silverio Villegas’s children, who are orphans right now, and tell them, ‘Oh, we can’t really get even,’” Ramirez said. “Democrats can walk, run, and chew gum at the very same time.”

Ramirez said she spent 14 hours at various polling places in her district on Election Day. She observed that many voters — including young first-time voters whose parents are currently in detention centers — told her what they expect her to do: “Make them pay.” She said her constituents also want Medicare for All, lower costs, lower gas prices and an end to the war in Iran.

“If we don’t do our job, we’re going to see the impact of that and the consequences come 2028,” Ramirez warned.

Why Immigration Reform Goes Hand-in-Hand with Affordability

Gibson then piggybacked on Ramirez’s point by saying that Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia also told CNN Democrats can “walk and chew gum." He then highlighted another Bluesky post from Ramirez promising to “hold every fascist in the administration accountable” while fighting to lower the cost of living.

The congresswoman argued that the current Republican-led Congress “has not lived up to the task of its mission of being a co-equal branch of government,” saying that the current majority ceded its Article I powers. She added that Republicans allowed Trump to launch an illegal war with Iran that has not only made Americans less safe, but driven up costs for virtually all consumer goods. And she said that with sprawling majorities in both the House and Senate, Democrats “are in the strongest position to pass immigration reform.”

She said young Latino voters were responsible for helping Democratic Senator-elect James Talarico win in Texas, and that young voters in former GOP strongholds like Kansas and Iowa turned out in unprecedented numbers simply because they are “so sick and tired of seeing a federal government getting away with murder.”

“Our leadership has to understand that we can’t continue to run away from doing our darn job in addressing immigration,” Ramirez said. “You can’t talk about affordability without talking about immigration reform.”

When Gibson noted that people have been demanding immigration reform for decades, Ramirez observed that it had been 40 years since the Immigration Reform and Control Act was signed into law in November of 1986.

“I was three years old. I’m old now,” she said.

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Ramirez Urges Democrats to Avoid Making ‘Excuses’

As Gibson and Ramirez discussed immigration reform, Gibson then pointed to the case of Lorenzo Salgado Arrajo in Houston, reminding viewers that he had been in the green card process for years when ICE agents shot him to death this summer. He then asked whether Democrats would be able to use the next two years to make their case to voters the kinds of policies they could enact with a Democratic president and large majorities like FDR had when he passed the New Deal.

Ramirez said this was only possible if Democrats “get out of our own way with excuses.” She said the incoming House and Senate majorities shouldn’t wait to pass immigration reform, Medicare for All and her own legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage to $25 (which Gibson argued for in a 2021 op-ed for Barron’s) regardless of whether Trump signs or vetoes them.

“This idea that we shouldn’t be passing legislation out of Congress that the president will veto is so small-minded and so narrow, and it doesn’t meet the moment,” Ramirez said. “You should be passing everything you possibly can, and then you let the American people point to who is in the way of their healthcare, who is in the way of their housing.”

She said the goal Democrats should aim for is a Democratic president to sign those bills within the first 100 days of 2029, and for Democrats to build a coalition built to last, as opposed to one that falls apart after a single election.

“I’m interested in a commitment with the Democratic Party where working people see us as their party for the next eight, 10, 12 years, and as long as we can,” she said.

Nuremberg 2.0?

Gibson observed that any criminal referrals that come out of House committees like Ramirez’s would ultimately land on the desk of the Trump Justice Department, which is led by Attorney General (and former Trump criminal defense lawyer) Todd Blanche. He then wondered whether the next two years of investigations could serve as the evidence-gathering process for a future Democratic attorney general, noting that Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon (who Raw America interviewed in August) has called for a “Nuremberg 2.0.”

“Absolutely,” Ramirez said. “To twiddle our fingers and just say there’s nothing really we can do until we actually have a Democratic president is a failure of our leadership.”

Ramirez said she was personally over blaming Donald Trump for the state of the country and instead wants Democrats to do the work necessary to make sure a “fascist” can never again take the reins of government. She also warned that if Democrats fail to prove their ability to lead to working-class voters, they may abandon the Democratic Party entirely. She said the real fight lies in fighting corporate money in politics, including within the Democratic Party.

“We’ve also been beholden to corporations, by lobbyists, by money in politics,” Ramirez said. “That is not a Republican problem only.”

Justice for Renee Good and Alex Pretti

Gibson then pivoted to Minneapolis, pointing out that federal agents fatally shooting Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January is still fresh on voters’ minds, with some even leaving “I Voted” stickers on their memorials on Tuesday. He also pointed out that ICE agent Jonathan Ross — who shot Good at point-blank range as she was driving away from him — still has yet to face any legal consequences. The agents who killed Pretti as he tried to defend a woman being attacked have also yet to be criminally charged. He then asked what Ramirez’s committee do to bring accountability to Noem, Miller and other administration officials who labeled Good a terrorist after her death.

Ramirez said her committee is obligated to bring in the people ultimately responsible and work on building a case. She also went on to say that simply firing someone from a position, as Trump did with Noem after Minneapolis, is insufficient. She pointed out that Noem is still currently getting a taxpayer-funded salary as a senior adviser to the State Department.

“What the heck is she doing? She shouldn’t be advising on anything,” Ramirez said. “That woman should be behind bars, and that’s what justice looks like.”

She also indicated plans to investigate reports of women being raped in federal immigration detention centers, warning that shrugging off accountability is a signal to victims that “their trauma isn’t worth acknowledging.” The congresswoman stressed that these abuses haven’t stopped just because there’s no cameras being pointed in their direction, and lamented that more than a 1,000,000 people have been detained or deported in just the past 18 months.

“We want people to know that if you committed a crime, whether you are a Cabinet leader, whether you are someone in the streets, justice is justice for all, not just some of us,” she said.

“For Me, It Is Personal”

To close the conversation, Gibson recalled how in the 19th century, Andrew Johnson’s gutted Abraham Lincoln’s Reconstruction programs in the wake of the Civil War and allowed Confederate states who waged war to rejoin the Union at virtually no cost, all in the name of healing and moving forward. He then chronicled how this paved the way for those same states to impose Jim Crow laws, carry out public lynchings of Black Americans, and encourage mass acts of organized racial violence like the Red Summer. He asked what Ramirez and the new majority would do to make sure Democrats don’t repeat the worst mistakes of American history.

Ramirez responded by sharing a story from visiting polling places in Chicago on Election Day. One local PAC leader who was flooding school board races with outside money told her not to take it personally. Her response: “This is what the problem is. It’s not personal for you. But for me, it is.” She spoke about her personal struggle in attending a public school without a social worker and struggling with depression as a teen, bringing it back to the importance of fully funding neighborhood schools.

“This work is personal for a number of us,” she said, pointing to newly elected members who she said have a “mandate” from constituents who are expecting them to deliver tangible results.

“We don’t have 10 years to prove ourselves. We have nine months to prove ourselves before we are back collecting signatures to get on the ballot,” Ramirez said. “We have a mandate, and we have a few months to prove to the people that we have, in fact, earned their support.”

Conversations like these require resources, from the outreach and research process, to the booking process, to the actual interview. And because Raw America has no wealthy owner writing checks to fund our newsroom, we rely entirely on support from our readers to keep this work going. If you learned something from this interview, will you become a paying subscriber right now?

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Tonight, White House officials say there are already a few Cabinet secretaries that Donald Trump may end up throwing under the bus as scapegoats for Tuesday’s midterm wipeout. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is hoping to use the upcoming lame duck session to ram through another Republican FCC commissioner before Democrats take back control of the Senate. In ruby-red Montana, a 32-year-old smokejumper just became the first Democrat the Big Sky State has sent to the House of Representatives in more than 30 years. And voters across the United States last night delivered an astonishing rebuke of Big Tech by voting down both data centers and the politicians who pushed for them.

A quick request before we go further: new Democratic majorities are about to be sworn in and conducting investigations into top Trump administration officials. We’ll be on the ground covering every new development. Our Capitol correspondent Luke De Cresce is already speaking to the incoming committee chairs in the House and Senate. Our White House correspondent Brian Karem is working his sources to find out the president’s moves. Our managing editor Carl Gibson will be lining up interviews with the new Democrats leading the fight.

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Trump Officials Name Cabinet Members Most Likely to Be Fired After Midterms

Donald Trump reportedly never came downstairs on election night. The Daily Mail reported Wednesday that while various Cabinet officials, advisors and MAGA activists watched election returns in the East Room of the White House last night, the president remained in the private residence with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and his intensely devoted 35 year-old aide, Natalie Harp. First Lady Melania Trump was apparently not with her husband last night.

As the blue tsunami began to materialize, the East Room gradually emptied out. Senior staffers were among the first to leave, followed by members of the Trump Cabinet. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was there early on but disappeared later in the evening. By the time the House of Representatives was officially called for Democrats around 10 PM Eastern Time, most of the attendees had deserted the White House and headed to a nearby bar.

One senior official described the mood in the White House’s private residence as “very, very dark.” One Trumpworld source told the Daily Mail that by 11 PM Eastern Time, the president was hate-watching Fox News in almost complete silence. In a series of screeds posted to Truth Social, the president made sure to lay blame at the feet of Fox News for Republicans’ losses. After Republicans officially lost control of the U.S. Senate, Trump launched into an attack on ousted Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, calling him a “RINO” despite praising him as “exceptional” just a few hours prior.

In the aftermath of the blowout loss, White House officials were already trying to decide on who to scapegoat for Republicans’ apocalyptic results. Some pointed the finger at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, insisting the GOP’s reckoning was entirely due to Trump’s war with Iran. That’s not a bad conclusion, given that the war has cost American taxpayers at least $47 billion due to higher inflation, gas just hit a new record high of $4.15 a gallon on average and most Americans tell pollsters they view the war was a gigantic mistake.

One White House official confided to the Mail that last night “would have looked very different without the Iran War,” and predicted Trump would ultimately throw Hegseth under the bus. One anonymous GOP donor even suggested Rubio’s tenure as secretary of state was finished, along with the careers of every Republican who endorsed Trump’s foreign policy decisions.

Other officials believe Susie Wiles is most at fault. One of the Mail’s sources said she had been doubling down on her claims that Republicans would hold their majorities as recently as September. Some staffers in the West Wing were apparently still under the impression that they would even gain some seats in Congress as of Tuesday morning. That source said Wiles and those staffers were “delusional right until the very end.” But Wiles is a little more difficult to fire, as she’s responsible for building virtually all of Trump’s political machine, including the current chair of the Republican National Committee to the Cabinet and the PACs supplying the GOP with funds. One official said anyone Wiles tried to blame for last night would be someone she installed herself.

Ultimately it all comes down to who the president decides to shackle with the blame. If he scapegoats his own political operation, Wiles’ head may be the first to roll. If it’s due to the war, then Hegseth and Rubio could be shown the door very soon.

Ted Cruz Aims to Sneak in Republican FCC Commissioner During Lame Duck Session

The 119th Session of Congress is preparing to gavel back in one last time for its lame duck session, and Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is make the most of his final two months as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. ArsTechnica is reporting that Cruz aims to enshrine a far-right MAGA majority on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) before the new Democratic majority is sworn in.

Cruz has reportedly scheduled a November 10 nomination hearing for Danielle Thumann Severs, who is a Trump FCC appointee currently serving as senior counsel to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. If she’s officially confirmed by the lame duck Senate majority, Republicans would have a staggering 3-1 edge on the FCC, which would almost certainly become 3-0 by the end of 2027, as Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez would have to leave unless Trump renominates her.

A lopsided Republican majority on the FCC would also likely embolden Trump’s attacks on cable networks that run programming criticizing his administration, with ABC and Disney already suing the Trump FCC over its unprecedented early license renewals for its affiliate stations.

The Communications Act is clear in that there can only be so many commissioners appointed by a president from one party. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon (who Raw America interviewed in August) has warned that an all-Republican FCC would be illegal under federal law, and that every license renewal, spectrum transfer and equipment certification the body approved may end up being thrown out by the judiciary. Wyden also wondered whether the president could fire Gomez if Thumann Severs gets confirmed, leaving a three-member, all-Republican panel that barely meets the requirement for a quorum.

For decades, both Democratic and Republican presidents followed the norm of pairing nominees so the commission had an even partisan balance. Trump has of course abandoned that tradition. 21 House Democrats recently wrote to Senator Cruz and Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota asking that any Republican FCC commissioner be paired with a Democratic appointee.

Gomez has been one of the few voices in the federal government pushing back on Brendan Carr’s attacks on news outlets that Trump has targeted. Carr has also endorsed Trump’s efforts to curb criticism of his administration on broadcast TV, like on ABC’s The View. In a pubic statement, Gomez demanded that Congress restore the FCC’s public interest standard as an obligation to American communities and stop using it as a tool to apply political pressure on behalf of the White House.

Republicans did something similar during the lame duck session in December of 2020, confirming FCC commissioner Nathan Simington right after Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. This led to Biden’s FCC being deadlocked until 2023.

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Democrat Flips GOP Seat in Deep-Red State for First Time in Decades

Montana voters made history last night, electing Democrat Sam Forstag over Republican Aaron Flint in the state’s Western U.S. House District. Flint officially conceded the race just after midnight local time. With 78 percent of the vote counted, Forstag was leading Flint by a margin of 51.5 percent to 45.7 percent.

The last time Montana elected a Democrat to the House of Representatives was in 1994, when Pat Williams was reelected. For perspective, that’s the same year Forstag was born. Williams’ daughter Erin was in the crowd of Forstag supporters last night in Missoula, saying nobody ever imagined it would take this long for the Big Sky State to send another Democrat to Washington.

Forstag is a 32-year-old seasonal smokejumper (a specialized firefighter who parachutes into remote areas to extinguish wildfires before they spread) who embraced his working-class roots. The young Democrat’s campaign focused on expanding healthcare, raising taxes on the richest Americans, protecting public lands and passing new federal laws to constrain the development of AI data centers. Flint — a former conservative talk radio host and veteran of the Iraq war — got support from Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson last month. Despite those high-profile endorsements, it still wasn’t enough to get him across the finish line.

Forstag gave his speech in jeans and a large belt buckle, promising to hundreds of supporters gathered at his watch party that he would fight so every American can afford housing, healthcare, childcare and retirement on one income.

Voters Overwhelmingly Reject Data Centers at the Polls

That same data center issue Forstag ran on ended up being one of the biggest stories of the entire midterm cycle. Data center-related initiatives were on the ballot in more than 40 races in 13 states, and voters defeated them in at least 38 of those contests. Six cities passed outright bans on data centers development, while 12 put strict limits on how much power they can draw from the public grid.

The biggest data center casualty was Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott. The incumbent governor turned the Lone Star State into a playground for the AI industry, with more than 300 data centers operating in Texas and plans in the works to eventually double that number. His campaign also took in more than $9 million from donors connected to the data center industry. Then, when public opinion turned on data centers, Abbott tried to save face by announcing a new “pause” on data center construction. But according to 404 Media, Texas’ state regulators continued to approve them anyway.

Democratic Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa catapulted to victory by making Abbott’s support of data centers a cornerstone of her campaign. She used Abbott’s own promise to make Texas a hub for the AI industry in numerous ads. He ended up losing reelection by more than 700,000 votes — a landslide defeat for the man who had been governor since 2015.

The dat center backlash was even felt in small rural towns in deep-red states. In Burgin, Kansas, for example, a mayor who voted to approve a hyperscale data center project lost to a write-in candidate, despite that mayor’s name being the only one on the ballot. In Emporia, Kansas — where local police were once filmed arresting a teacher for clapping during a public meeting about data centers — banned them. And Yukon, Oklahoma voters recalled their own mayor who backed a data center project.

Michael Whitesides of the group Local Progress told 404 Media that the backlash is simple: people everywhere are tired of watching their utility bills skyrocket while billionaire-funded projects belch toxic air into the sky. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who reportedly spent almost $500 million on the midterms (and more than $220 million in Texas alone) posted on X last night that data centers in space were starting to look appealing.

Outlets like David Ellison’s CBS, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times all spent the better part of a year downplaying and dismissing talk of a blue wave. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X both actively suppressed stories like these on their platforms and allowed far-right disinformation to run rampant. And yet they were all proven wrong last night while independent outlets like Raw America never wavered in giving you the unfiltered truth.

We’ll never stop working to give our readers the high-quality independent journalism you’ve come to expect from Raw America, but we’ll be honest: we don’t have anywhere near the level of resources our competitors do. And we’ll only be able to keep going if readers like you decide that today will be the day you step up and fund independent journalism. Will you join as a paying subscriber right now and invest in the future of independent media?

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A source in Donald Trump’s White House source told Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem that the president is despondent over Tuesday night’s blowout loss for Republicans. And as Democrats prepare to take control of both chambers of Congress, in January, both Trump along with multiple members of his Cabinet could all face impeachment investigations. Ohio Governor-elect Amy Acton made history as the Buckeye State’s first female governor, and she apparently sent Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s concession call straight to voicemail after he exploited her childhood sexual abuse for an attack ad. And in Texas, former Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan is calling last night’s results an “extinction-level” event for the GOP.

Before we get to the news, an urgent request: as election results poured in last night, Raw America’s reporters in Washington were working their sources to get the inside scoop on how Trump and Republicans were responding to the midterms. Our managing editor was reaching out to the press offices of high-ranking Democrats to get live interviews scheduled with key decision-makers in the next Congress. We’re only able to do this work because of readers who chip in to fund our newsroom as paying subscribers.

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Tonight at 5:30 PM ET, Congresswoman Delia Ramirez — the #2 Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee — will be joining Raw America to discuss Democrats’ plans to hold top Trump administration figures accountable in the next Congress! Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

Exclusive: Trump Insider Says Midterm Blowout ‘Brings an End to This Presidency’

After Democrats won control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump is now officially a lame duck. Raw America can reveal that people inside his administration say the president is despondent over Tuesday night’s results.

One White House source told Raw America’s Brian Karem that the loss “brings an end to this presidency. He’s a lame duck.” The source added that Trump is “not taking this well.”

For more than three hours Tuesday night, as the resentment against Trump showed itself in vote tallies across the country, the president remained uncharacteristically silent.

At 4 PM ET, he posted a scathing critique of Fox News to his Truth Social account, claiming he was still the most popular president in history.

But one staffer said he went “radio silent” after polls started to close across the country. For the next several hours as election results rolled in and a Democratic win became more obvious, the president remained silent.

Shortly after 7:30 PM ET, he posted to Truth Social that he “wasn’t on the Ballot” and that if he had been, “we would have won in a landslide.” He went on to call Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott — who lost in a landslide to Democrat Gina Hinojosa — a “RINO,” or “Republican in Name Only.”

“The president worked harder than the candidates themselves,” Raw America’s White House source said. “He wasn’t on the ballot.”

As Trump shifts blame for the debacle of the midterms, several Democrats said Trump is avoiding responsibility for the candidates he promoted and campaigned for. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on NBC Tuesday night that “Trump asked people to vote like he was on the ballot, and that’s exactly what they did.”

There continues to be speculation about what exactly Trump will do following Republicans’ blowout loss in the midterms, including filing lawsuits to challenge election results in various states and trying to prevent newly elected Democrats from being officially seated. However, White House staffers are confiding to Raw America that the president may just spend the final two years of his term focusing on building his $400 million White House ballroom and “spending his time at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster.” One Ohio Republican said they would be “looking for work first thing tomorrow.”

Shortly after 8 PM ET, Trump appeared to have changed his defiant tune, and told the New York Times he would accept the results of the election and will find a way to work with the Democrats going forward.

But Raw America’s White House source scoffed at that statement, saying Trump “won’t work with the Democrats and he won’t take responsibility for anything that he does.” They added that “he never has and he never will.”

That prediction may have already been proven correct, as Trump went on to post a meme to Truth Social showing a red hat with the word “VETO” on the front. He also heaped more blistering criticism on Fox News in which he blamed the network “for these losses” by constantly putting members of the opposition on air.

One supporter of failed Texas U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton told Raw America that the stinging defeat was “all on the president.” They added that Trump “asked people to vote like he’s on the ticket and America is done with Donald Trump.” A staffer for defeated South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Darline Graham told Raw America: “The president cost us a red state.”

Chris Vance of the anti-Trump GOP group Our Republican Legacy rendered his own take of the election, telling Karem: “The Republican Party has suffered a devastating defeat. The American people have rendered their verdict on MAGA, America First and the policies of the current administration and Republican Congress. 2028 begins now. Donald Trump will never again lead the Republican Party in a general election. It is time to begin the debate about the future of a principled Republican party in the post-Trump era.”

Here’s Who Could Be Impeached Once the New Democratic Congress Is Sworn In

Once Democrats take back control of committee gavels in a few months, they’ll also be deciding how to proceed with a growing stack of impeachment resolutions that went nowhere under the current Republican Congress. Lawmakers have already filed articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Education Secretary Linda McMahon. There are also at least four impeachment resolutions specifically aimed at Trump.

The first impeachment fight may kick off before the new Democratic Congress is sworn in. Outging Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky — who lost his primary earlier this year to a Trump-backed challenger (who won last night’s general election) — aims to force a full House vote on eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth potentially as soon as next week. Massie is accusing Hegseth of waging war on Iran without obtaining the approval of Congress, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro without the consent of Congress and for blowing up boats in the Caribbean and killing several hundred people without first getting a judicial green light. The outgoing GOP majority may vote to table it, though it’s unlikely the next Congress would do the same.

Trump called the effort to impeach Hegseth “terrible” and praised his Pentagon chief “the best at his job in many many years.” He also labeled Massie as a “loser” and “a major sleazebag.”

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee, told NBC News that Trump has “undoubtedly” committed impeachable offenses. He pointed to the the Iran war, unauthorized spending without Congressional approval and his bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House to make room for his ballroom. Raskin added that Democrats “will not hesitate to use [impeachment] if we need to use it.”

Impeachment is still a heavy lift even with majorities in both the House and Senate. The only cabinet secretaries to ever be impeached were War Secretary William Belknap in 1876 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024 and the Senate acquitted both. Nobody from the executive branch has ever been removed via the impeachment process.

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Amy Acton Sent Vivek Ramaswamy’s Concession Call to Voicemail

After the Ohio gubernatorial race was called for Democrat Amy Acton, Republican billionaire candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s concession didn’t go as planned. Ramaswamy told supporters he’d called Acton to officially concede, and “left her a message.”

Plenty of Ohioans likely understood Acton’s refusal to take her opponent’s official concession call. Last month, the Ramaswamy campaign aired an attack ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother calling her daughter — who she hadn’t spoken with for decades — a liar about her childhood upbringing. She ultimately lost custody of Acton and her brother after Acton’s stepfather was criminally indicted for allegedly raping her when she was just 12 years old. Acton’s mother stayed married to her alleged rapist, who died while on the run from justice. Both Donald Trump and JD Vance supported Ramaswamy’s ad. Even outgoing Republican Governor Mike DeWine called it “deeply, deeply troubling.”

With 95 percent of the vote counted, the Associated Press showed Acton up by a margin of 51.9 percent to 44.8 percent. She’s officially the first female governor of Ohio and the first Democrat to hold the office since Ted Strickland back in 2006. Trump won the state in all three of his presidential campaigns.

Acton, who served as health director in DeWine’s administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, told supporters during her victory speech she’d gone from homeless to becoming a physician. She promised she’d “work with anyone and everyone,” including the Ohioans who voted for her opponent.

Former Texas GOP House Speaker Calls Midterms an ‘Extinction-Level’ Event for Republicans

Texas just went through its own massive anti-GOP reckoning. Three weeks ago, former Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan warned Texas Monthly’s Eric Benson that a big win by Democrat James Talarico in the U.S. Senate race would mean “a bloodbath down [the] ballot.” The New York Times now estimates Talarico will have defeated Republican Ken Paxton by about 9 points.

When Benson called Phelan Tuesday night, Phelan called the midterms “a complete extinction-level election.” He estimated there were 19 Democratic flips in the Texas House of Representatives, even though Democrats only needed 14 flips to win control of the chamber.

Texas hadn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office since 1994. This time, voters elected a whole slate of Democrats to every single statewide office. This includes Gina Hinojosa over incumbent Greg Abbott in the gubernatorial race, Vikki Goodwin over Dan Patrick in the lieutenant governor’s race, Nathan Johnson as the next attorney general, Sarah Eckhardt for state comptroller and Jon Rosenthal for railroad commissioner, handily defeating far-right MAGA Republican Bo French, who doubled down on a racist social media post late in the election. Trump’s mid-decade gerrymander, which was engineered to squeeze out five more GOP congressional seats in the Lone Star State, has so far led to a net gain of zero.

Phelan observed that while Democrats were working tirelessly to turn out voters, Donald Trump spent election eve talking about algae and pipes at the Lincoln Memorial while Democrats were focused on high gas prices and the cost of health insurance. According to Phelan, Democrats “were talking about what voters care about and we were not.”

Because Raw America has no billionaire owner telling us what to cover, we’re able to bring you an exclusive report describing the despondent mood in Trump’s White House and Democrats’ efforts to impeach both Trump and his Cabinet. But we can only keep this work going if the readers like you, who open these newsletters and read them to the end, step up to become paying subscribers.

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Be sure to catch our live interview with Democratic Congresswoman Delia Ramirez at 5:30 PM ET tonight, where she’ll talk about Democrats’ plans to hold top Trump administration figures accountable. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

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Tonight, Donald Trump’s Justice Department sent criminal target letters to around 20 prominent Democrats tied to Alaska’s Senate race on Election Day itself. Democrats flipped their first House seat of the night in Guam, a territory whose early results gave the party an encouraging start. Iowa is on track for record-breaking midterm turnout, with Democrats outpacing Republicans in early ballots. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis admitted that Trump’s war in Iran is a “big, big drag” on Republican candidates.

Before the news, an urgent ask: Tens of millions of Americans took to the polls today in a referendum on Donald Trump’s agenda. The outlets owned by pro-Trump billionaires are already trying to downplay Democrats’ gains and urging them to pull their punches if they win back control of one or both chambers of Congress.

But while the oligarchs and their pet newspapers and networks are abdicating their responsibility to relentlessly cover the Trump regime, Raw America isn’t letting off the gas. Our Capitol reporter, Luke De Cresce, and our White House reporter, Brian Karem, are currently working their sources to find out the administration’s plans to challenge election results that will almost certainly be unfavorable to the president and his party.

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Trump DOJ Announces Investigation Into Democrats on Election Day

On Election Day, Donald Trump’s Justice Department announced it’s going after Democrats in Alaska. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the DOJ has sent criminal target letters to approximately 20 leading Democrats connected to the state’s high-profile U.S. Senate race.

Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm represents Alaska Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola, is one of the people who received a letter. At least one official at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also received one. The letters warn recipients that they could be targeted in a federal investigation into the recruitment of independent Senate candidate Dan J. Sullivan, who shares a name with incumbent Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan.

One anonymous source confided to the Times that the DOJ is also contemplating potential donor fraud and conspiracy charges. It remains unclear when exactly the letters were sent out, or whether every intended recipient received one.

Trump has spent multiple days fuming about the Alaska race, accusing Democrats of committing election fraud. He’s repeatedly hurled attacks at both Marc Elias and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. During a Tuesday morning appearance on Fox & Friends, Trump describe Elias as “a bad guy, very bad guy” who “should go to jail, in my opinion.”

Last night, the president posted a flurry of Truth Social posts claiming that Daniel J. Sullivan was “missing in action,” even suggesting he may have been kidnapped. Trump then insisted that “the Dumocrats are trying to steal this Race by putting a FAKE Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr. on the Ballot.”

When looping those posts together with the DOJ’s target letters, the administration may be laying the groundwork for Trump to officially intervene if Peltola emerges as the victor. He’s already floated the idea of a “redo” election if his endorsed candidate loses, even though he has no legal authority to do so. This is especially in Alaska, which uses ranked-choice voting. Trump interfering with the certification of the Senate race would almost certainly sow mass confusion and continue to erode faith in elections not just in Alaska, but across the country.

Democrats Flip First House Seat in Hopes of Blue Wave Midterm

Over in the Pacific, Democrats got their first good news of election night in the U.S. territory of Guam. Because the island is fourteen hours ahead of New York, its polls close early and can sometimes be seen as a bellwether of overall election results.

With all precincts reporting in Tuesday’s unofficial count, Democrat Alicia Garrido Limtiaco was ahead of incumbent Republican delegate James Moylan — who has no voting power in the House of Representatives — with 51 percent of the vote. The Democrat so far has 15,600 votes for 51 percent of the total vote to Moylan’s 14,900, representing around 48.8 percent of the vote. That would flip Guam’s House delegate seat from red to blue.

That’s a bonafide flip, as Moylan has held the seat since January 2023 and won reelection in 2024 by a margin of approximately six points. If Tuesday’s numbers hold up, that would mean an eight-point leftward shift in the territory in just two years, as voters across the U.S. sour on the Trump administration over persistently high prices and the Iran war.

Democrats only need to flip three Republican-held seats to win back control of the House of Representatives, and multiple forecasts show the odds are highly in their favor.

Guam’s results weren’t all blue, however. Republican gubernatorial candidate Tony Ada and his running mate, E.J. Calvo, are currently leading Democrat Therese Terlaje and her running mate, Sabina Perez, by just over 1,000 votes. Current Democratic Governor Lou Leon Guerrero is term-limited and leaving office in January.

Trump celebrated the gubernatorial race in a Truth Social post, writing that Guam had “an early call for a REPUBLICAN Victory in the top spot” and giving hios congratulations to Ada. Notably, he didn’t acknowledge the likely Democratic victor in the race for Guam’s House delegate seat.

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Purple State with Key Senate Race Approaching Record-High Turnout

Meanwhile, Iowa could be headed for a historic midterm if turnout numbers hold up. Early voting turnout was up about 25 percent compared to the 2022 midterms, and voters have been steadily streaming to the polls all day.

Nearly 500,000 Iowans voted early in the 2026 cycle according to data released by the Iowa Secretary of State’s office Tuesday morning. Democrats cast 46 percent of those early ballots, while Republicans cast 34 percent (the remainder of those ballots were cast by independent and unaffiliated voters).

Iowa’s Republican Secretary of State, Paul Pate, predicted the election in the Hawkeye State is “going to be a record-maker for sure.” Pate said that in-person voting has been higher than mail-in voting across Iowa, and he cautioned that some tight races may take some time to call once polls close at approximately 8 PM local time.

In Polk County, which houses Des Moines, election workers reported turnout that was brisk to heavy, with lines at some polling places already starting to fill up at 6:30 in the morning. County Auditor Jamie Fitzgerald, who is a Democrat, said that roughly 70,000 voters had already turned in absentee ballots. He told the Des Moines Register that he expects turnout to match 2018 levels, which hit around 200,000 voters, despite Iowa voters having nine fewer days to vote early in the 2026 cycle.

Voters in Des Moines told reporters they’re primarily motivated by the rising cost of living, and water quality (which is an issue adjacent to data center development). The Department of Justice has also deployed election monitors to polling places across Iowa, including in Polk County, which is the state’s most populous.

GOP Governor Admits Trump’s War Is a ‘Big Drag’ on Republicans

Our last story tonight: one of Trump’s staunchest allies is now admitting what a lot of Republicans still won’t say out loud. Outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose second term ends in January 2027, told sports commentator Stephen A. Smith on SiriusXM last night that the president’s war in Iran is a “big, big drag” on Republican candidates across the country.

DeSantis — who unsuccessfully ran against Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — said voters are feeling the cost of the war at the gas pump, saying fuels costs are “higher because of this conflict. That’s just a fact.”

He’s not wrong: gas prices hit a record high average on Election Day of $4.11 per gallon on Tuesday. This is largely due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is a choke point for roughly 20 percent of the global oil supply. More oil is moving through the strait now in comparison to when the war began in February, but prices are still much higher than they were before the first strikes earlier this year.

DeSantis warned Republicans against downplaying and dismissing voters’ concerns about gas prices, saying Republicans who won’t admit the economic impact of the war are “gaslighting” voters. He also pointed out that the president was elected to a second term by promising no new wars, and that some Republicans have simply checked out over Trump’s broken promises. DeSantis went on to say that if the war continues to drag on through the remainder of Trump’s presidency, it would be “devastating” to the MAGA agenda and make the 2028 campaign “very, very difficult” for the GOP.

When Smith asked DeSantis how Republicans can adjust if they lose big tonight, the Florida governor said AI, data centers and Big Tech were the crucial sticking points with voters. He warned that Democrats are already favorted to win over conservative-leaning voters on those issues, and said the GOP will bleed voters if it continues to embrace “corporatism.”

Think about why you wouldn’t see any of these stories above the fold in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, or in the lead block of David Ellison’s CBS Evening News. The answer is simple: the MAGA billionaires who own most of the media want to be the sole deciders of what you get to know. But they won’t win, and you reading this newsletter right now is proof.

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Today, a fact-checker who has covered Donald Trump for years is laying out the five most likely debunked claims the president is likely to make if Republicans lose the midterms tonight, and what the facts actually show. A new poll finds that more than half of active-duty troops are reportedly wanting to quit due to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s politicization of the military. A January 6 insurrectionist Trump pardoned is now facing new federal charges for allegedly threatening to assassinate judges. And voters, election officials and even a former Capitol rioter are all worried Trump is planning to deploy his most militant supporters back to the Capitol if the midterms don’t go his way.

One quick thing before today’s news: on the day millions of Americans will decide who controls Congress for the next two years, social media platforms owned by MAGA billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are actively promoting disinformation while burying independent journalism telling the plain truth about what’s happening. Musk is even doing this while pouring almost half a billion dollars into Republican campaigns. But you can ensure their efforts fall short by becoming a paying subscriber and getting these stories directly in your inbox, which is the one thing they can’t touch.

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5 Debunked Claims Trump Is Most Likely to Make if GOP Loses Midterms

Fact-checker Glenn Kessler knows Trump’s election playbook as well as anyone. He spent more than two decades at the Washington Post, and spent 15 years running the paper’s fact checker in which he frequently countered Trump’s lies, before Jeff Bezos’ cuts pushed him out. He’s now tracking and debunking the president’s false statements for MS NOW. Ahead of today’s vote, Kessler published a “prebuttal,” predicting that Trump will make at least five widely debunked claims should the GOP lose one or both chambers of Congress tonight.

The first claim is that late-counted mail ballots supposedly erased Republican victories. Leads tend to change on election night simply because of the order in which votes get counted. Democrats can appear strong early on in jurisdictions that count mail ballots first, while Republicans tend to narrow the gap as Election Day votes roll in. Trump has already argued that foul play was afoot in Virginia and California earlier this year due to this pattern, even though the Brookings Institution found mail voting fraud amounted to only four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots, which is obviously nowhere near enough to change the result of a statewide election. Just last month, Trump himself released a video urging his supporters to vote early, absentee or by mail. The president himself frequently votes by mail, given that he’s registered in Florida but lives in Washington.

Trump’s second often-repeated myth is that noncitizens are supposedly voting in large numbers. Trump has floated the claim that there are roughly 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote across the country and that 35,152 were registered in New Jersey alone. While New Jersey’s own preliminary review found there were roughly 6,600 improper registrations and up to 400 actual voters, FactCheck.org concluded that still wasn’t anywhere near enough to change the outcome of any federal race in the Garden State.

Third, Trump is insisting that Democrats get multiple ballots. In a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee this spring, he baselessly insisted that Democrats can sometimes get “six or seven ballots.” When Maryland mailed out replacement primary ballots to fix a printing error, the president said the correction was meant to hurt Republicans’ chances. Kessler observed that because Maryland’s ballot return envelopes each carry a unique identifier, there is still only one ballot per voter that actually gets counted.

Fourth, Trump frequently claims foreign governments and/or voting machines somehow changed results at the last minute. In a primetime speech this summer, Trump said there were “shocking vulnerabilities” in election systems, though he declined to present any actual evidence. There’s still nothing to prove that any foreign government ever changed vote totals in an American election at any point in history.

Finally, Trump has claimed on multiple occasions that Democrats’ opposition to nationwide voter ID laws is proof that they’re cheating in elections. When the president’s SAVE Act failed to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, he posted to his social media platform that Democrats wanted to sink it because “they want to continue to cheat in Elections.” But the National Conference of State Legislatures has made clear that states without photo ID laws for voting have plenty of other ways to verify voters’ identities.

In November of 1864, with the country in the midst of a civil war, Abraham Lincoln said that if the Confederacy could force the Union to forego or delay a national election, it could claim to have already conquered the country. Lincoln went through with the election anyway, because he knew that election aren’t a threat to the republic, but are the very essence of the republic itself. A president who spends months telling his followers that any election loss is because of theft is doing from the inside what Lincoln refused to let an army do from the outside.

Pete Hegseth’s Politicization of the Military Is Driving Troops to Quit

Meanwhile, many of the very same people who swore an oath to defend the country are now looking for ways to rejoin civilian life. A new poll conducted by the veterans group Common Defense found that 53 percent of active-duty troops want to quit because of how much the military has been politicized under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Another 45 percent said the defense secretary’s policy changes and the instability that followed have them thinking about leaving the service earlier than they anticipated.

Two-thirds of active-duty servicemen and women said recent policy decisions governing the military were made for partisan political purposes more than out of concern for mission readiness. Army veteran Jose Vasquez, who leads Common Defense, told Military.com that more troops are blaming hyper-politicization for pushing them out of the service. Vasquez added that this presented a “readiness crisis.”

Half of the troops polled disapproved of Donald Trump’s performance as commander in chief. Hegseth’s approval rating was nearly identical. This isn’t a criticism of the entire chain of command though, as troops rated their own commanders much better, with an average approval rating of 56 percent. This poll comes as the war with Iran continues to rage on. Trump said over the weekend that he’s still planning to “take care of” more targets in Iran, and he carried out bombings of various sites just last night.

The framers feared the prospect of an army that only answered to one man instead of to the people, prompting them to write into Article I of the Constitution that no federal appropriations for the army could last longer than two years. They had just watched kings deploy soldiers against their own citizens, and they wanted Congress to have the power of the purse on a short leash. When our troops swear an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution, only to watch their public service get turned into a political prop, they’re rightly recognizing the very same danger the founders were most worried about.

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January 6 Rioter Trump Pardoned Now Facing Charges of Allegedly Threatening Judges

New federal charges have been filed against Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., a 58-year-old former car wash owner from Georgia, for threatening the lives of multiple federal judges.

During the January 6 insurrection, Meredith had car trouble as he approached Washington D.C., and he was unable to get to the Capitol before police already took back control of the building and stopped the riot. The next day, he sent a message to a family member threatening to “put a bullet” in the head of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to Justice Department documents. Agents went on to discover a 9mm handgun, an assault-style rifle with a scope and roughly 2,500 rounds of ammunition in his truck and trailer, meaning that traffic problem likely saved many lives.

Meredith pleaded guilty to his initial charges and served time behind bars before Trump pardoned him on his first day back in office along with nearly 1,600 other participants in the insurrection. According to the New Yorker, Meredith has since turned on his own relatives, former classmates and even his own former lawyer, demanding financial compensation and threatening to seize their property through lawsuits.

Now, federal prosecutors say he posted to social media that “ALL J6 Federal JUDGES will be EXECUTED!” Seamus Hughes of CourtWatch News reported that the FBI linked the social media account in question to Meredith using records from Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), Google and T-Mobile. A federal judge found probable cause two days before Halloween. That same social media account reportedly asked Trump to appoint him as “Head EXECUTIONER” and warned various judges in an October post that Pete Hegseth “has plans 4U.”

Nearly 60 years ago, the KKK bombed the home of federal judge Frank Johnson’s mother in Montgomery, Alabama, because handed down a ruling that Black Americans had the right to march from Selma and vote. Back then, the terrorists were fighting against the federal government. But today, a man threatening to execute judges has been pardoned by the current president of the United States. That’s the biggest difference between a country with a violent fringe group of extremists, and a country where those extremists have friends in the Oval Office.

Voters Fear Trump May Call for New Insurrection if Midterms Don’t Go His Way

The kind of rhetoric seen from people like Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr. is exactly what has election officials in multiple states on edge today.

The Telegraph recently interviewed 38 year-old Jason Riddle of New Hampshire, who drank wine from a member of Congress’ office during the 2021 Capitol insurrection. In 2022, he wrote in his local paper that he regretted the insurrection failed to overturn the 2020 election. Now, Riddle is sober and is a member of a group called Leaving MAGA. Riddle told the Telegraph he worries history may repeat itself depending on what happens in the midterms tonight.

In some battleground states, polling places have installed bulletproof glass out of an abundance of caution. Some election officials are even carrying firearms in anticipation of violent threats. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research said that some officials are bracing for the possibility that — for the first time in American history — the federal government “might be an adversary looking to actively interfere [with the electoral process].”

When reporters asked Trump on October 27 if he would accept the results of the midterms, he said he would, but with the caveat that they had to be “honest elections.” The Trump administration’s Justice Department has already sent warnings of potential non-citizen voting to election officials in every state. The DOJ has also asked Washington state to set aside ballots from more than 400 allegedly illegal registrants. Democratic Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said the timing was obviously designed to cast baseless suspicion on election results. The Justice Department is also deploying 1,000 federal monitors to the polls in all 50 states. For context, that’s triple the number of observers sent in the 2022 midterms.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told the paper that voters fear Trump “will not care” about legal challenges playing out in court “and will call in people with guns.” The new Congress is slated to begin on January 3, 2027. Plenty of Americans c learly remember that it seemed unthinkable that there would be an attack on the Capitol building until it actually happened.

The only successful coup in American history happened in Wilmington, North Carolina back in 1898. That was when white supremacists who just lost an election armed themselves, burned down the office of the Black newspaper, killed dozens of their neighbors and put themselves in city hall. Nobody was ever punished for that despicable act. The lesson the country learned was that if you’re willing to use violence against an election and nobody will stop you, then to the victor go the spoils. That’s why the events the unfold across the country in the days following tonight’s election will matter just as much as what happens at the polls today.

As tens of millions of Americans are casting their ballots to decide control of Congress, the news outlets owned by billionaires with Mar-a-Lago memberships like David Ellison, Jeff Bezos and the Murdochs are determined to depress and demoralize Democrats. Independent journalism like the kind you read every day at Raw America is increasingly becoming the only reliable way to learn about what’s really happening.

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A New York-based psychologist is now accusing Donald Trump of sexually abusing her since she was eight years old, and trying to intimidate her into silence decades later. An election forecaster says he’s seen “no signs of life” from Republicans in major swing state Senate races just 24 hours before the election. One election worker told a Michigan Democratic state lawmaker that he “gladly cancelled” her vote. And Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign is announcing a record-shattering fundraising haul one day after his former primary rival endorsed his Republican opponent.

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Psychologist Accuses Trump of Sexually Abusing Her When She Was 8 Years Old

New York psychologist Dr. Larissa Portnoff is now publicly accusing Donald Trump of sexual abuse in a video circulating online just before the 2026 midterm election. She said Trump starting abusing her when she was just eight years old, only for it to become even worse by the time she was 10. The abuse continued until she was around twelve years old. Portnoff said Trump came back to abuse her again at ages sixteen and seventeen. Portnoff’s allegations have not been independently verified as of Monday evening.

In the bideo, Portnoff said she’d escaped what she referred to as a “pedophile ring.” She then directly told the president: “You have hurt so many children and you’re clearly a pedophile and you’re dangerous on top of it.”

Portnoff added that for the past year, she was contacted by someone she believed was a political go-between for Trump, calling that “a form of witness intimidation.” The president allegedly invited her to a New York Yankees game on September 11, 2025, and then proposed she meet him in a private room at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. She also claims someone in Trump’s circle found her home address and learned her identity from sealed records in which she made her initial accusation as a “Jane Doe.”

Portnoff, who is now in her thirties, then said she relayed her story to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which referred her claims to the attorney general’s office. She’s now calling for an independent investigation free from partisan influence. She ended the video with a message to the president, and said if he thinks he can intimidate her, “it’s not going to work.”

Election Forecaster Says GOP Showing ‘No Signs of Life’ on Eve of Midterms

As Election Day looms, Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics is now projecting Democrats to win at least 53 Senate seats after the dust settles.

Kondik based his prediction on the president’s plummeting approval rating along with the strength of multiple Democratic Senate candidates across the country. He also observed that his projections are already weighted in favor of higher-than-expected Republicans turnout, particularly in traditionally red states where they tend to overperform polls.

Kondik told CNN hosy Boris Sanchez that there’s even a scenario in which Democrats surpass the 53-seat mark, acknowledging that it’s still “kind of crazy to say” and that he wouldn’t have predicted such a result even a month or two ago. His remarks come in the wake of the final New York Times/Siena poll of the midterm cycle, which showed Democrats leading in seven Senate races including Iowa, Kansas, Michigan Texas and others.

He warned that Republicans may hold onto their majority, which currently sits at 53-47. But Kondik said that while he’s been waiting for the GOP to consolidate its base before voters head to the polls, “you just don’t see it here at the end of the line,” and that there are currently “no signs of life” in the Republican Party.

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Michigan Election Worker Tells Democratic Lawmaker He ‘Gladly Cancelled’ Her Vote

In Macomb County, Michigan, one election worker is under scrutiny after telling a Democratic state representative that he’d “gladly cancelled” her vote. State Representative Mai Xiong, who is running for reelection herself, voted early Saturday and posted to her Facebook page that she was proud to have voted for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on October 31, which happened to be his 42nd birthday. Cameron Bruce of the Macomb County Clerk’s Office responded that he was happy to have “cancelled” Xiong’s vote.

Xiong then asked Bruce if he meant that he specifically tampered with her ballot or if he voted for Republican Mike Rogers, urging him to be specific “so there isn’t any confusion about fraud or abuse of the system.” Bruce then wrote “oh brother” with a laughing-crying emoji. He later clarified that his vote for Rogers offset her vote for El-Sayed, and went on to say he didn’t have the ability to cancel an individual voter’s ballot even if he wanted to. He also apologized if Xiong “took it the wrong way.”

Here’s the issue: Bruce isn’t a temporary worker helping out on Election Day. He’s a full-time staffer with the county Elections Department, who the clerk’s office recently honored for five years of service. According to public records, he’s worked recounts in Macomb County in both 2022 and 2024. Xiong said she was “deeply disturbed” by Bruce’s comment, and said the public can’t trust elections to be fair when the people in charge of protecting them make jokes about supposedly messing with ballots.

Bruce’s boss, Republican County Clerk Anthony Forlini, is also the GOP nominee for Michigan secretary of state, who, if elected, would oversee all elections in the state. Forlini ordered a forensic audit of all Macomb County election servers in 2021 in response to Joe Biden’s victory. Even though his audit found no evidence of outside interference, he’s still repeatedly refused to say Biden won the 2020 election.

Abdul El-Sayed Posts Record Fundraising Haul After Former Primary Opponent Endorses GOP Candidate

Finally tonight, Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign says it raised nearly $2.5 million on Sunday after Congresswoman Haley Stevens — who lost to El-Sayed in the August 4 Democratic primary — officially endorsed MAGA Republican Mike Rogers. El-Sayed spokesperson Cole Wozniak said the donations came from over 65,000 contributions averaging roughly $37. Nearly half of that money came from first-time donors.

After losing the primary, Stevens publicly bcked El-Sayed and told CNN just days earlier she was voting for the entire Democratic ticket up and down the ballot. But on Sunday, 48 hours before Election Day, she appeared alongside Mike Rogers at a Detroit area church and officially endorsed him despite attacking him as a Trump stooge for several months. Her chief of staff promptly resigned, along with roughly half of her congressional staff.

Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel said Stevens had “abandoned everything she claims to care about,” and wrote that Steves was no longer a member of the Michigan Democratic Party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called her endorsement of Rogers a “despicable betrayal.” Former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton told The View Stevens was just “a sideshow” and that Michigan voters shouldn’t let themselves get distracted by her antics.

Stevens has maintained that El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel’s continuous bombing of Gaza was a bridge too far. In a Sunday interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Stevens was unable to give a clear explanation for her sudden about-face, at first saying El-Sayed displayed a “lack of kindness” while calling him out over his refusal to disavow California-based streamer Hasan Piker. Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Dingell of Michigan called Stevens’ interview one of the “most painful” she had ever watched. Trump went on to praise Stevens in a post to his Truth Social account, saying that she displayed bravery.

None of this eleventh-hour drama seems to be doing much to move voters. The latest New York Times/Siena poll shows El-Sayed comfortably ahead of Rogers by a margin of 53 to 42 percent. That’s the widest margin in any of the seven Senate battlegrounds.

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This morning, Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico now has a seven-point lead over Republican Ken Paxton in the final New York Times/Siena College poll, which is the highest advantage he’s had so far. Donald Trump seems to be under the assumption that Democrats will take back the House of Representatives tomorrow night, and he’s already vowing to protect top Republican donor Elon Musk from potential Democratic investigations while also suggesting he’ll issue preemptive pardons for White House staff. Maine’s high-profile US Senate race between incumbent Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson may not be decided for several days after the election if the margin is close enough to merit a first-ever ranked-choice Senate runoff. And the Trump Administration’s IRS and Social Security chief is accused of sending out pro-Trump propaganda emails to millions of Americans right on the eve of the midterms.

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James Talarico’s Chances of Winning Texas Senate Race Hit New Record High

Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic U.S. senator for nearly 40 years. And yet, the final New York Times/Siena poll released Sunday shows Democratic state representatives James Talarico leading Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton by a margin of 50 percent to 43 percent among likely voters. That’s his biggest lead of the race to date.

The NYT/Siena survey is one of the most highlyrespected polls in the country, getting an A rating from VoteHub. There’s still some question about how big Talarico’s lead really is, with the RealClearPolitics average of polls taken between October 15 and November 1 showing a tighter contest. Talarico’s edge over Paxton in the average is 49 percent to 46.5 percent.

At a recent campaign rally, Talarico framed the Lone Star State’s Senate race as a fight between “the powers that be and the powers that ought to be.” He accused powerful specual interests of having “bought and paid for Ken Paxton.” The former public school teacher added that his campaign is for Texas “teachers and nurses, farmers and ranchers,” and saying they’re the reason he’s running for office.

Meanwhile, Paxton spent Sunday in San Antonio pitching his “Protecting the Texas Promise Plan,” which he insists would save Texans thousands of dollars a year. He admitted to Republican voters that “every poll shows it’s gonna come down to the wire,” pushed them to get as many Republicans as possible out to the polls and ended the rally by parroting Donald Trump’s “fight, fight, fight” line.

Paxton’s final stretch has been somewhat rocky. In an Election Eve stop at the Alamo — which was originally billed as the grand finale of his two-week “Come and Take It” bus tour — was quietly removed from his campaign schedule. The Paxton campaign has yet to offer an explanation. A heckler recently disrupted a Paxton campaign appearance and was removed by security in an awkward moment caught on tape.

Texas once eleced Ralph Yarborough to the U.S. Senate, making him the only senator from a former Confederate state who ended up voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The populist streak Yarborough represented never really died in Texas: instead, it was simply outspent by wealthy special interests. When Talarico talks about teachers and ranchers uniting against the corporations and lobbyists who bought his opponent, he’s making a direct reference to that tradition of economic populism. With control of the Senate within grasp for Democrats, Texans could be the ones who decide what kind of country the rest of us will live in for the next two years.

Trump Appears to Be Bracing for Blue Tsunami by Floating Preemptive Pardons

Meanwhile, the president appears to be making preparations for a blue wave tomorrow night. In a Monday interview on her “Pod Force One” podcast, host Miranda Devine asked Trump about rumors that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk could face investigations or even see some of his assets seized if Democrats take back committee gavels after the midterms. Trump insisted that was just “talk,” but added the caveat that “if it is talk, we’ll have to protect them.”

Musk has already spent more than $476 million of his own money on bolstering Republican in the 2026 midterm cycle. The South African centibillionaire recently warned in a post to X that if Democrats win back the White House in 2028 while controlling both chambers of Congress, it could signal the end of democracy. That’s a particularly bold claim from a foreign-born oligarch currently influencing American elections.

Trump also suggested he may issue preemptive pardons for staff and various MAGA allies in the event Democrats issue subpoenas and launch investigations, telling Devine: “I would if I needed to. Sure.” He went on to say he would hand out pardons without even thinking twice about it.

When asked about his rhetoric suggesting a run for an illegal and unconstitutional third term, Trump said he would love to do it but admitted “the language [of the Constitution] is very exacting.” He insisted there’s plenty of time to enact his agenda, saying a lot can get done in two years’ time.

In 1788, George Mason warned Virginia’s ratifying convention that a president could end up pardon himself for crimes he had encouraged. James Madison responded that any president who actually did so would face impeachment. But nobody in that room imagined an American president announcing the possibility of pardons coming down before any formal investigations were even launched. If Congress lets that stand, it’s effectively a green light for every future president that the Constitution’s checks on executive power are completely optional.

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Maine’s Senate Race Could Come Down to Ranked-Choice Runoff

Control of the Senate may come down to a handful of states, including Maine, where Republican Senator Susan Collins is in a dead heat with logger and former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson. USA Today reports that Maine voters might not know the winner of the contest until possibly the end of next week.

In addition to Collins and Jackson, there are six declared write-in candidates who have also thrown their hats in the ring. Maine is just one of two states nationwide (the other being Alaska) using ranked-choice voting in statewide races with more than two candidates in the ballot. If nobody gets more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, while voters’ second choices get redistributed until someone crosses the majority threshold.

Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told the paper that a ranked-choice runoff is “highly possible.” It would be an unprecedented first for a U.S. Senate race in the Pine Tree State. Tabulation usually concludes by the Friday after the election, which would fall on November 13 this year. However, Bellows’ office is emphasizing that it plans to move faster.

There’s already precedent for ranked-choice runoff in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. That particulr district has fallen to a ranked-choice runoff in three of the last four elections. In 2024, both write-in votes along with approximately 12,000 blank first choices across the district kept Democratic Congressman Jared Golden just under 49 percent after Election Day, triggering a four-day tabulation that eventually named him the winner.

The stakes are incredibly high this year given Republicans’ razor-thin majority. Susan Collins is the only Republican from a state that 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris carried, and Democrats view Maine as a must-win race if they hope to get to the 51 seats needed for a majority.

It’s worth remembering that Americans didn’t have the ability to elect their own senators until the ratification of the 17th Amendment back in 1913. Before that, U.S. senators were handpicked by state legislatures and party bosses in backroom deals. Ranked-choice voting is merely the latest step in a long fight to make sure the U.S. Senate answers only to voters instead of insiders. A few extra days of counting ballots is a small price for a result that all voters can trust.

Trump’s IRS and Social Security Chief Accused of Sending Out MAGA Propaganda

Our last story this morning: millions of Americans just got blatant political messaging from the federal government right as they’re preparing to vote in the midterms. Both the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the IRS — each of which are led by Trump appointee Frank Bisignano — sent emails heaping praise on the president.

One message from Bisignano claimed that under the Trump administration, the SSA is “transforming into a model of excellence.” An email from the IRS promoted the so-called Working Families Tax Cuts (which are overwhelmingly tilted in favor of the rich), telling recipients they’re keeping more of their earnings thanks to “President Trump’s historic tax cuts.” The SSA has more than 100 million online account holders, though it has yet to publicly say how many people received the message.

Washington University in St. Louis law professor Kathleen Clark told International Business Times UK that the emails are more propaganda than public service announcements. They appear to violate the Hatch Act, which is a 1939 law preventing federal employees from using the powers of their offices for partisan politics. No formal violation has yet been declared.

This isn’t the first time this year that official government offices sent out partisan messages using taxpayer resources. In July, the SSA claimed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave more than 35 million seniors an average of $7,500 in tax cuts. This prompted Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin to confront Bisignano over both how accurate that claim actually was and also sending it to Social Security beneficiaries’ official email addresses. In late October, the IRS sent a message telling families to “Claim your child’s Trump Account today!”

Government watchdogs are also pushing back. The groups Democracy Defenders Fund and Reporters Without Borders both filed a Hatch Act complaint after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick all made an appearance at a campaign rally in Alaska for Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, who is in a tight race with Democrat Mary Peltola.

In 1974, Richard Nixon’s second article of impeachment charged him with trying to turn the IRS into a weapon against his political enemies. Back then, that alone was considered serious enough to end a presidency. Using that very same same agency — along with the agency that mails out Social Security checks to millions of retirees — as a campaign megaphone is a direct assault on the idea that the government belongs to all of us and not just one man.

The small cabal of pro-Trump billionaires who run CNN, CBS, HBO, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Fox, the Wall Street Journal and others are pulling out all the stops to try and hide the truth from us a day before the election. At Raw America, we’re doubling down on covering the stories the billionaires refuse to acknowledge. But that kind of independence requires resources, and we need your help now more than ever.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent media. If you haven’t yet, please help us get these stories in front of the most people by clicking the ❤️ and hitting the restack button.

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and this morning, I’m not going to walk you through the week’s outrages. Two days before an election, I want to talk to you about something else.

First, a thank you. This week you brought us closer to 10,000 paid subscribers than I thought possible when we set that goal. Each of you who stepped up did it for the same reason I started Raw America: because somebody has to tell the truth when the people with the microphones won’t. You’re the reason this publication exists. We don’t have a billionaire. We have you.

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I Can Feel Something in the Air

Anyone who’s grown up in New England knows the feeling. Your fingers freeze. The snow sits on the ground for a month. You slip every time you leave the house. Then suddenly, one morning, you see the crocus shoots poking out of the soil.

That’s what this week felt like. Something is building.

I’ve been doing this a long time. I started Raw Story in 2004, the year George W. Bush got reelected, running on a campaign of homophobia. I was 23 and thought gays would be pariahs for good. In 2012, Obama’s courageous vice president — Joe Biden — voiced support for gay marriage. In 2015, gay marriage became legal nationwide.

It wasn’t something I expected in my lifetime.

Progress is slow. Change comes gradually. But the moment things look most hopeless is usually the moment right before they turn.

Let me tell you about Hungary.

The Country That Wasn’t Supposed to Come Back

I wrote to you about this in April, the morning after it happened, and it’s been in the back of my mind almost every day since.

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Good morning. Happy Saturday, and happy Halloween! 🎃 I’m John Byrne. Before we get going, tap that ❤️ and restack this edition. Three days from the election, every share helps us get out the vote.

ICE paid nearly $500 million for a shuttered Minnesota prison that the owner offered to the state for $75 million last year, and the owner gave Trump’s inaugural committee half a million dollars. Trump tried to talk about his sisters at a Florida rally and couldn’t get the words out. Satellite imagery shows Iran damaged 274 buildings at two dozen U.S. installations, while Pete Hegseth was declaring the war won. And the husband whose money set off Alina Habba’s White House feud isn’t the 29-year-old billionaire he claims to be.

Quick note before the news. October is almost over and we’re well behind our paid subscriber goal for the month. That matters more than usual, because Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution and Elon Musk’s X is doing the same. That leaves your inbox as the only reliable way this reporting reaches you, because it’s the one channel they can’t touch. We’re also raising money to file suit against the White House to get our reporter back inside. Right now, a paid subscription runs about 17 cents a day, less than you’d spend on a single cup of coffee each week.

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Trump’s ICE Paid Six Times the Asking Price for a Prison Owned by a Trump Donor

Here’s a deal only a government could make.

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Today, a federal appeals court shut down the Trump administration’s last-minute push to set aside thousands of California ballots. A federal judge opened a formal investigation into whether Justice Department lawyers misled her about Trump’s plans for a Washington golf course. A Republican strategist is admitting the GOP’s plan to have Trump rescue the midterms has failed. And a Texas grand jury indicted an ICE officer accused of running down a construction worker with his SUV.

One more thing before the news: we exclusively rely on readers to do this work, and we’re asking you to make today the day you step up and chip in. While almost every major legacy media outlet’s coverage is being dictated by billionaire owners with Mar-a-Lago memberships, the only people we answer to are our readers. But that can only work if enough people reading this on the free list become paying subscribers.

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Court Shuts Down Trump’s Last-Minute Attempt to Disqualify Thousands of Ballots

Today, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Donald Trump another stinging loss. Judges officially shot down the Justice Department’s demand that California set aside thousands of ballots in the upcoming midterms, under the baseless argument that they may have been cast by non-citizens. The court handed down the decision on a 2-1 vote, with the majority opinion authored by Circuit Judge Mark Bennett, who is a Trump appointee. He was joined in the ruling by Biden appointee Gabriel Sanchez.

The DOJ is claiming that California mailed ballots to roughly 20,000 people who may not actually be U.S. citizens, and it wanted to prevent the state from including those ballots in the official count on November 3 until the voters’ citizenship could be verified. California said the list the DOJ provided is unreliable. A district judge had already denied the administration’s request on the grounds it could disenfranchise eligible voters.

The Ninth Circuit panel agreed with the lower court ruling, writing that there’s “no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system.” Hundreds of thousands of ballots have already been processed and anonymized, meaning there’s no way to trace them back to the people who cast them.

However, the pressure campaign is still ongoing. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in the DOJ’s Los Angeles office, warned that any state official who knowingly processes a noncitizen’s ballot is “opening themselves to legal jeopardy.” At least three election officials in Los Angeles County have been called before a grand jury on November 4, the Wednesday after the midterms. It’s also important to note that a federal judge already disqualified Essayli earlier this week, ruling that he was “unlawfully serving” in his role due to never having been actually confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

A coalition of labor unions — including ones with millions of members like the AFL-CIO and AFSCME — is now petitioning a federal judge to block the Justice Department from ordering officials to stop the counting of ballots, and to drop its threats of prosecuting local and county officials. In Washington state, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to hand over its list of names of potentially ineligible voters who cast disputed ballots to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the UCLA Voting Rights Project. This marks the first time anyone outside the federal government will actually get to examine it.

This is important precisely because federal data used in other states has wrongly flagged thousands of actual U.S. citizens, many of whom are immigrants who legally went through the naturalization process. The United States unfortunately has a long and ugly history of purging legal, eligible voters under the guise of election integrity, dating back to the Jim Crow South’s literacy tests and poll taxes.

Judge Opens Formal Investigation Into Whether Trump DOJ Lied in Court

Meanwhile in the nation’s capital, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes — an appointee of former President Joe Biden — just opened up a formal investigation into whether attorneys with the Trump Justice Department and elsewhere in the administration lied about Trump’s renovation plans for the East Potomac Golf Course. The investigation is expected to be handled by a special master appointed by the court, and it may even lead to sanctions for top DOJ staff.

Judge Reyes’ hearing ran for almost three hours, and she repeatedly admonished Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward — who is the third-most senior official at the DOJ — at the lectern. Reyes began by reading aloud the professional conduct rules for lawyers practicing in D.C. According to CNN, Reyes looked right at Woodward as she emphasized the part about attorneys being required to only make factual claims in court.

The context is key: the Trump administration has been insisting all along there’s no formal plans to renovate the course, despite Trump announcing the project will begin “immediately.” On October 10, crews ripped out more than 400 trees at the course after only giving notice at the last minute. At one point during the hearing, Woodward seemed to suggest the tree removal was part of a broader plan to update the course, which the administration had previously denied.

When Woodward tried to walk back what he’d just said, laughter reportedly broke out in the courtroom. Reyes then proceeded to read his own words back to him from the transcript before asking, “Are you kidding me right now?” In an earlier exchange, when Woodward was arguing that Reyes’ questions weren’t relevant, the judge was unbothered, and simply asked Woodward if he was done and was ready to give the answers she had already asked him for.

Reyes made it clear that so far, she hasn’t found evidence of anyone misrepresented anything, and is only allowing for the possibility through the formal investigation. She’d already blocked removal of additional trees in a 70-page opinion issued earlier this week, which the administration is appealing. Meanwhile, Trump has attacked the judge on his social media platform, calling her a “crazed lunatic.” She also ordered DOJ attorneys to preserve all documents relating to the case.

These stories are increasingly harder to find on the networks and in the newspapers owned by MAGA billionaires. Raw America is only able to cover them and bring them directly to your inbox because we have no wealthy owner telling us what we can and can’t report. We have you. Help us keep this work going by becoming a paying subscriber for 20 percent off.

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GOP Strategist Admits Republicans’ Plan to Have Trump Save Midterms ‘Didn’t Work’

With the midterms now just four days away, the Republican strategy of putting Donald Trump at the forefront in hopes that the president would bolster turnout is apparently backfiring. That’s according to a GOP strategist working on multiple battleground races, who told HuffPost in a text message that “it didn’t work,” and that every Republican on Capitol Hill is paying a heavy price.

That strategist made the remark after Trump said Thursday he would be staying at Mar-a-Lago rather than following through on previous plans to headline rallies for Senate candidates in Iowa and Kansas. The White House has since reversed course Friday and scheduled Sunday events in both states, but political strategists in both parties say there’s almost no chance of those appearances turning things around for the GOP short of a significant polling error.

Democrats are now pouring money into races that just a year ago were considered to be safely in Republicans’ corner. That even includes Mississippi, where incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith is in an unexpectedly close race with prosecutor Scott Colom in a state Trump won by more than 22 points just two years ago. House Democrats are also spending money in an attempt to oust National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson in North Carolina. They’re also attempting to flip three Republican-held districts in Florida as well as former Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s deep-red seat in Upstate New York.

The latest polls show that 82 percent to 84 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump’s job as president are planning to vote for Democrats. Additionally, Republican pollster Brent Buchanan found that while 81 percent of self-identifying progressive Democrats say they’re extremely motivated to vote, only 58 percent of traditional Republicans are saying the same. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts believes Democrats will win up to 230 seats (218 seats is enough to secure a majority).

Democrats are also benefiting from increasingly high early voter turnout from Black voters across the Deep South in states like Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. That’s partially due to voter anger over the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision this spring that significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Republicans in Ohio are also spending millions of dollars to prop up up socialist candidate Greg Levy in an effort to siphon votes from Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown.

ICE Agent Indicted for Hitting Texas Man with SUV and Breaking His Leg

Our final story tonight: a jury in Harris County, Texas just indicted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Mario Alberto Morales for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors say that on October 10 in Houston, Morales drove an unmarked SUV into 48 year-old construction worker Miguel Parra Hernandez as he ran through a parking lot, breaking his leg.

ICE is claiming that Parra Hernandez deliberately ran in front of the SUV. But District Attorney Sean Teare says video shows otherwise. Surveillance camera footage shows Morales’ vehicle jumping over a median and heading straight toward Parra Hernandez. Body camera footage prosecutors played on Monday showed Morales saying, “I was coming in and I hit him with the car.”

Morales’ attorney insists it was an accident, and accused Teare of indicting his client for political gain. ICE stated that the allegations against Morales were “RECKLESS and FALSE” and claims local prosecutors have no authority to prosecute federal agents.

But ICE’s version of events has other problems that could complicate Morales’ case. The agency admitted that the real target of the investigation on the day Parra Hernandez was hit was a man named Jose Mendoza-Cervantes. To further complicate matters, an immigrant rights group working with the man’s family now says that, according to Mendoza-Cervantes’ daughter, he’s been dead since 2017. Parra Hernandez has lived in Harris County for over 30 years, and has no criminal record and no current deportation order.

Teare says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has yet to cooperate with his investigation. He’s also accusing ICE of destroying evidence, in the same way that DHS stonewalled his investigation into the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a construction worker who ICE agents shot to death earlier this summer.

We’re only able to cover stories like these — in which a local prosecutor is accusing ICE of obstructing a criminal investigation, a judge investigating Donald Trump’s Justice Department and the president losing his bid to throw out thousands of ballots — because we don’t answer to a MAGA billionaire or a corporate board. That kind of independence is increasingly rare today, but it can only work if readers believe in it enough to keep it funded.

That’s where you come in. The fact that you’re still reading this shows that you value our independent journalism. Will you make your support official by becoming a paying subscriber right now? It only takes a moment to join, and it only costs 17 cents a day.

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent reporting. Please help us reach the most people by clicking the ❤️ and tapping the restack button. It genuinely helps more than you know.

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Reporters for MS NOW just broke an extremely troubling story: seven people inside and around the FBI reached out to say that they’re afraid that in the next week they’ll be called upon to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt our election next week.

They all know that federal law has made it a crime for federal law enforcement officers to enter polling places armed (unless there’s an active crime, like a shooting, going on), and has been since 1865, which has them particularly worried about their own possible legal exposure.

Several also noted that what makes this concern particularly cogent and urgent is that they’ve already watched Trump’s and Blanche’s Justice Department use invented claims of “irregularities” to get a judge to sign a warrant that allowed them to march armed agents into Georgia election offices on national television with little blowback and no consequences.

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Today, in an exclusive report from Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem, a Republican member of Congress is heaping criticism on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his sudden firing of the Pentagon’s top war planner as both Democrats and Republicans push for Hegseth’s impeachment. Defense Department officials are also now bracing for the likelihood of Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion military budget never making it out of Congress. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance are canceling public appearances even in traditionally red states in the final days of a midterm cycle that’s looking increasingly bad for the GOP. And the House Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat is now putting a plan in place to investigate the president’s son-in-law over billions in payments from foreign governments.

As you’ll read below, Raw America’s White House reporter, Brian Karem, is tapping into his sources at the Pentagon and in Congress to bring you news that no one else is reporting. He’s there not because a MAGA billionaire wrote a check, but because our readers chipped in to support hard-hitting independent journalism. Whether this work keeps going is entirely up to you.

Our readers are the only thing keeping us afloat. We’re still short of our October fundraising goal and need your help to get there. If you’ve been enjoying these newsletters, make today the day you upgrade from a free subscription to a paying one. For the next four days, you can lock in 20 percent off a full year’s subscription. That’s just 17 cents a day. Will you subscribe right now and help keep independent journalism alive?

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Exclusive: Republican Member of Congress Slams Hegseth’s Firing of Top General

Pressure is mounting in Congress to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, with both Democrats and Republicans apparently now working together to make it happen. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky filed the initial resolution, and Democrats who expect to take over the House — and possibly the Senate — in the midterms told Raw America Thursday night they’ll vigorously be pursuing impeachment in the next Congress.

This comes after Hegseth suddenly fired Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia without warning on Thursday. Sylvia was the Pentagon’s Director for Strategy, Plans and Policy and its highest ranking war strategist. Sylvia was fired roughly 24 hours before a strategic meeting with Defense Department officials and the president about plans to ramp up strikes on Iran.

Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, told Raw America that Hegseth may have sealed his own fate by firing Sylvia, saying: “There is a time coming when Hegseth will be held accountable. He knows it and there’s likely nothing he can do about it.”

Sylvia has been in MAGA’s crosshairs for the better part of a year. In September of 2025, far-right influencer Laura Loomer called for his dismissal on X after his son, Gavin Sylvia, made critical comments about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death online after he was killed at an event in Utah. Loomer explicitly called on Hegseth to “review the employment of Gavin’s father, MG Brett Sylvia.”

One unnamed Republican member of Congress confided to Raw America that “it doesn’t look good no matter how you cut it. It almost looks like Loomer is running the Pentagon.”

The Pentagon is saying Sylvia was fired for failing polygraph tests and was being investigated for potentially leaking classified information about wars in Iran, Ukraine and elsewhere. Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a Thursday statement that the Pentagon has “zero tolerance for the intentional, unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” and that after an “extensive” investigation, Sylvia, “along with others,” had been referred to the Justice Department “for potential legal action.”

When a reporter in a Thursday press gaggle asked Trump what proof the administration has, the president seemed unaware that Sylvia is a man, saying “she’s going to have big problems.”

When President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur in 1951, it was a president reminding America’s most renowned general that the United States military answers to the Constitution, and not to any one man’s personal ambitions. But under this president, that principle has been turned on its head. Now, the nation’s top war planner has been unceremoniously thrown out on the eve of a major war meeting because a right-wing social media influencer wanted his family to be punished. That’s exactly why the Framers wanted the military to be under civilian control.

Pentagon Preparing for Trump’s Proposed $1.5 Trillion Military Budget to Fall Apart

Elsewhere at the Pentagon, Defense Department officials are apparently expecting Trump’s record $1.5 trillion military budget to fall apart in Congress. For months, the administration has pushed for lawmakers to appropriate money to projects like a “Golden Fleet” battleship and his proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system. The administration is also hoping to get funding to replace a weapons arsenal depleted as a result of the Iran war.

However, Trump’s funding request will require bipartisan support. And so far, that isn’t panning out. The GOP is likely to lose control of at least one chamber of Congress on Tuesday, and Pentagon officials are reportedly now drafting a budget proposal about $400 billion smaller than the president’s. A former Pentagon official told Politico that “none of them expect anywhere close to 1.5 trillion.” Another source confided that the Pentagon “can’t admit” it’s planning for less money, since that would publicly contradict the White House’s public statements.

The president is hoping to get the budget across the finish line by using the budget reconciliation process to add $350 billion to a $1.15 trillion base budget. That process is what allows the Senate to pass certain spending bills with just 51 votes and bypass the filibuster. But Republicans have less than five weeks after the November 3 midterms before the new Congress is sworn in. Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio told Politico that if Republicans lose their majorities, “it’ll be the Last Supper.”

There’s a clear reason Article I of the Constitution makes it clear that no military appropriation can last longer than two years. The founders had just fought against a tyrant who kept a standing army that answered only to him. They wanted every generation of Congress to have to look the voters directly in their faces before writing another big check for the war machine. That’s precisely the kind of accountability this administration is trying to avoid by passing a reconciliation bill in the lame duck session.

We report on stories like these only because we don’t have a billionaire owner ordering us to bury them. Help us keep this work going by becoming a paying subscriber for just 17 cents a day.

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Trump and JD Vance Hiding from Voters in Final Days of Midterm Cycle

Speaking of the midterms, both Trump and Vice President JD Vance are now cancelling planned public appearances in states with tight Senate elections just four days before voters head to the polls. Trump called off rallies in Kansas and Iowa scheduled for this weekend, and is instead opting to hold tele-rallies by phone. The Republican National Committee called it a “72-hour sprint” that would focus on at least 19 states.

Trump has hosted 25 rallies in October. On Monday, he sounded audibly hoarse in Corinth, Mississippi, telling supporters, “God didn’t make your vocal cords to do a rally every day.” He reversed course on Thursday, telling a Reuters reporter at a South Carolina event “I feel perfect” when asked if his busy rally schedule was wearing on him.

A few hours after that event, JD Vance cancelled a planned Friday press conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota touting the Trump administration’s “War on Fraud,” without giving a specific reason. The cancellations come as Trump’s approval rating continues to plummet to new record lows as gas prices remain stubbornly high due to the war with Iran. NBC News’ polling average shows that 52 percent of Americans want Democrats to control Congress, whereas only 43 percent want Republicans to remain in charge.

160 years ago,Andrew Johnson took his own unpopular presidency on the road in what he called the Swing Around the Circle. Voters proceeded to heckle him all the way from from Cleveland to St. Louis. He then watched voters hand his opponents a veto-proof majority in Congress that fall. Trump appears to have learned the one lesson Johnson didn’t, which is that when the public has turned against you, the safest place to be is out of sight. This also shows that a president who’s that afraid of his own voters should tell us everything we need to know about where how Tuesday’s election will pan out.

Top Democrat Reveals Plan to Investigate Jared Kushner Over Payments from Foreign Governments

Our final story this morning: Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland — who would chair the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats take back the House of Representatives — is officially setting his sights on Jared Kushner. Vanity Fair magazine published an excerpt from journalist Matthew Cole’s upcoming book. According to that excerpt, Kushner allegedly had access to roughly $2 billion in secret funds linked to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while he was serving as a senior adviser to his father-in-law.

In a letter initially shared with MS NOW, Raskin told Kushner he’s “currently unfit to serve in any capacity in the United States government,” writing that at least five foreign governments seem to have “damning kompromat” on him. Raskin is calling on Kushner to fully recuse himself from representing the United States in any capacity until he hands over records of his foreign payments.

Democrats currently lack subpoena power in the minority. However, Raskin wrote this letter without his usual Oversight Committee co-author, which signals he’s planning to have the Judiciary Committee investigate Kushner if Democrats win back committee gavels on Tuesday. Kushner responded to Cole’s reporting by calling it “completely insane,” even though he has well-documented ties to Middle Eastern leaders. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, for example, poured roughly $2 billion into his firm, Affinity Partners.

After Congress discovered in 1938 that Nazi Germany was quietly paying Americans to influence our politics in their favor, it passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act arguing that anyone taking foreign money to influence America should be required to disclose that to the public. Almost ninety years later, a president’s son-in-law sitting on $2 billion in Gulf money is negotiating foreign policy on America’s behalf and insisting any questions about the arrangement are “insane.” Whether Jamie Raskin gets his subpoena power next week could also be seen as a vote on whether the foreign agent registration law still means anything.

Raw America is only able to cover stories like these — in which a Republican exclusively tells us that the Pentagon is now answering to a far-right influencer and a top Democrat is planning to investigate the president’s son-in-law — because we only answer to our readers, not a billionaire owner. That kind of independence is increasingly rare, but it requires resources to sustain.

If you’ve been considering upgrading your free subscription to a paying one, today is the day to make it official. We’re offering 20 percent off an entire year’s subscription, but only until Tuesday. After that, it goes back to the regular price. Can we count on you to subscribe right now?

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. If you haven’t yet, be sure to hit the ❤️ and click restack so these stories can reach the most people. Have a great weekend.

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