Argument Is About Algae.....

Trump’s Closing Argument Is About Algae

As voters sweat high prices and corruption, the president talks up his fountain repairs and plans to install 500 more statues.

Dan Friedman

Will undecided voters in states such as Alaska and Michigan base their ballot decisions Tuesday on President Donald Trump’s fountain repairs in Washington, DC?

If so, Trump’s 47-minute appearance on Monday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would make sense. But polls show voters are worried about high prices, corruption, and Trump’s war with Iran, not DC algae blooms. And the president’s use of his final scheduled appearance before the midterms to talk about pipe replacements looks like the bizarre self-indulgence of a guy utterly uninterested in the problems of regular Americans.

Wearing a white USA hat and looking tired, Trump brandished photographs intended to make the case that his widely derided effort to repair the Reflecting Pool was a great success. He said, not for the first time, that the algae that have plagued the pool through several presidential administrations is at last vanquished. And he again attempted to fault vandals for damage to the pool that both the Justice Department and the firm that he hired through a no-bid $15 million contract to do the job have said was caused by contractor error.

Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum used a press conference with a smattering of attendees to celebrate what they tout as their transformation of Washington. Trump talked up various fountains that are working again, having financed their rehabilitation with money diverted from national parks elsewhere in the country.

The president also gave a shout-out to his “National Garden of American Heroes,” a collection of, until Monday, 250 statues of famous Americans he intends to install near the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. But on Monday, Trump announced that the number of statues has grown to 500 and informed his audience that the work has “already started.”

That may be news to the Justice Department. In federal court, where opponents of the statue garden are seeking a court order blocking the work—which Congress has not approved—Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in an October 29 motion that the administration has not completed decision-making on the garden, let alone begun work. “The National Park Service has not received direction to include the National Garden of American Heroes in West Potomac Park,” Gustafson wrote last Thursday.

Trump also talked up his controversial plans to overhaul a golf course in East Potomac Park, and the 250-foot arch he plans to build in front of Arlington National Cemetery. The “triumphant arch military complex,” as the president now calls it, “will have tremendous drone capability,” he said. “I would say sniper or shooter capability.” Trump recently began invoking a national security justification for the decorative arch in an evident ploy to try to get courts to grant deference to the plan. “It will be the most beautiful arch in the world,” Trump added on Monday. “It will be more beautiful than the Arc de Triomphe.”

Eventually, Trump shifted his attention to the election. In a familiar refrain, he called Democrats communists and repeated a seemingly racist, though also incoherent, attack on Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan. Trump said the Senate needed “a little bit of apple pie,” not “a jihadist.”

While gas and diesel prices remain high, Trump touted a recent dip in oil prices, attributing it in part to what he said was the seizure of Venezuela’s oil wealth following the US military takeover in January 2026. While other US officials have tried to downplay US influence in that country and pushed back on accusations of colonialism, Trump on Monday pretty much went there. “When you add in our conquest of Venezuela,” he said, “we are taking in hundreds of billions of dollars of oil every single day.”

Trump defended his work in office, asserting that he has “kept far more promises than I made.” But Trump, as he delivered his remarks, appeared, in a phrase he once popularized, “low energy.” He seemed ready for an electoral setback, acknowledging that the party of the president in power tends to lose seats in midterms. He noted, with uncharacteristic realism, that things were not looking good for the GOP: “We gave this a very strong shot.”

For us???

‘Are You With Us, the Workers, Or Are You With the Big Tech Billionaires?’

"We need a comprehensive worker-centered approach to AI," AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview. "So if lawmakers aren’t going to do it, then we’re going to do it."

By Victoria Guida

Liz Shuler, who leads the largest labor coalition in the country, has a warning for politicians hoping to run in 2028: The next two years will be a “which-side-are-you-on moment.”

The AFL-CIO president is laser-focused on how artificial intelligence could reshape the workforce, a topic she said is a “litmus test” heading into the next presidential election. The goal, she said, is avoiding the same kind of disruptive pain that workers experienced during globalization, when people saw their jobs outsourced while the government provided little in terms of a safety net.

“It’s just moving so fast, and we can’t let it get away from us without us,” she said in an interview Friday evening. “We definitely can see a world where there will be like seven or eight billionaires controlling everything. The power imbalance is already tilted toward corporations and the wealthy, and this is just going to exacerbate inequality.”

Shuler, who campaigned this year alongside Democratic candidates like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and Texas’ James Talarico, said she sees an opportunity to build bipartisan support for AI-related worker protections, given voter anxieties over what a technological revolution will mean for them. After early victories in California, she said the AFL-CIO plans to take the policy fight to more states and build momentum at the federal level.

“People are very, very anxious. They’re frustrated,” Shuler said. “This is a moment for some unconventional and unusual allies coming together.”

Still, building consensus in the months ahead will be a slog, especially in Washington. Voters are expected to hand control of one or both chambers of Congress to Democrats on Tuesday, resulting in divided government and an even steeper path to legislating than before.

And she illustrated how tricky it will be for lawmakers even within the Democratic Party to navigate disagreements on one of the issues they’ve collectively campaigned on — opposition to President Donald Trump’s tariffs — by declining to specify how aggressively she’d like to see them rolled back.

More broadly, the union leader said lawmakers need to show they’re fighting for policies that will bring down costs and boost wages — split-party control be damned.

“It’s really about the package of working-class economic issues that gets brought up, debated, and passed,” she said. “And then if it ends up getting vetoed, then, which side people are on?”

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your priorities for the next Congress?

We’ve been working overtime, of course, on these races all across the country to really center a working-class economic agenda in the campaign. So it only makes sense that when the next Congress starts, that that translates to a union-made, people-powered agenda for the legislature.

It’s very much centered around the bread-and-butter economic issues that you report on, and it’s obviously costs and things being too expensive: gas, groceries, rent, health care. But it’s also the second piece of it that travels with it, which is pay not keeping up with inflation.

All these candidates have to deliver on the promises that they’ve made on the campaign trail.

The labor movement has long been a huge source of support for tariffs as an economic policy tool. But the AFL-CIO has spoken out against some of the sweeping moves taken by the Trump administration. How much of what’s been done would you like to see undone?

We’ve often talked about tariffs, as you said, as a tool, but the way they’ve been utilized with this administration’s approach hasn’t been strategic and hasn’t been used with countries that aren’t playing by the rules, like China, and instead are being used against our friends like Canada. And that’s never been the labor movement’s philosophy.

We look at it as a strategic tool that you use on an industry or sector basis to remedy or level the playing field. So we would support the tariffs that have helped certain industries like steel and autos and some of the things we’ve long complained about being subject to unfair competition. But we also think that reckless tariffs can be very damaging to the economy in other areas, like we’ve seen with these across-the-board approaches.

There’s some discussions in the Democratic Party, of course, as to their posture as a party because they’ve never quite been able to get the approach calibrated so that working people hear in their approach that they want to actually help create jobs, not offshore jobs.

We want to use tariffs as a way to bring jobs back to the U.S.

I think that was what workers were listening for in the last presidential election, and the messaging just didn’t quite land with working people because it was all focused on how it would affect retailers and prices for consumer goods, not as much about the impact on jobs.

That’s something that we have to really look closely at and think about as we start to pivot into a new Congress and then, ultimately, a presidential election in 2028.

I take it from what you’re saying that most of the tariffs the Trump administration has put on should be removed, and there’s selective stuff that should be kept. Is that a fair way of thinking about what you’re saying?

I would have to consult with some of our trade experts to really drill down into what sectors stay the same and what we would advocate for rolling back. It gets very detailed very fast, and we have unions who are steeped in this, that live and breathe this every single day and have seen the impacts on their workforce, and so we would want to be probably more careful in how we characterize that.

I’m just saying, without being specific, is it that most of the tariffs should go away?

I don’t know that I would say most. I would say the reckless approach, where it’s been more of a scattershot approach, is something we don’t agree with, and yeah, we think a strategic use of tariffs makes more sense.

I also want to ask about AI. You’ve been vocal about the dangers for workers, but there’s also been some benefits for workers, including that data center construction is employing a lot of tradespeople. So, does that temper your feelings, your policy positions about the technology at all?

Well, I don’t conflate data center construction with AI and technology’s impact on the workplace as much as people do in the press. I feel like the debate has been merged into one because the data center construction has been used as a lever to try to slow things down or control the debate.

People are seeing these data centers up in their communities, so it’s front and center, right there in their face. And if they’re not done responsibly, and they’re not built with high-road standards and companies paying their fair share, then absolutely, it’s an issue of concern. And we keep saying they can be built responsibly with union jobs and high-road strategies and tax policy that supports the community and electricity and water policy that makes the companies pay their fair share.

But that data backbone is going to be built no matter what, and it’s either going to be built in places in the U.S. that can do it responsibly or it could be built overseas where forced labor is used, and we’re still using a data backbone that’s being imported or utilized from afar. So I think that debate is an infrastructure debate.

To me, the more troublesome thing is that people are focused on data centers and how they’re constructed and where they’re constructed, while these tech billionaires are running away with unregulated use of AI in every aspect of our lives, including the workplace. And not many people are paying close attention to that.

This is going to disrupt every industry, every sector, every type of job. And right now, no one is talking about the guardrails that we’re going to need to protect workers, to protect our privacy, the data usage and how it’s collected, where it’s used, if it’s sold. There’s so much that’s happening around us that policymakers and elected officials have not addressed.

That’s the real debate that we should be focusing on.

You said recently that the AFL is drafting gold-standard AI legislation. What are the priorities there?

There’s a lot of folks who are introducing bills that are dealing with one particular aspect of AI, like the frontier models or the national security implications or child safety. It’s bills taking a slice of this. And we keep saying that we need a comprehensive worker-centered approach to AI. So if lawmakers aren’t going to do it, then we’re going to do it. And so we’re working internally with our unions to say, “What would that look like?”

And we’ve got to do it quickly, right? Because these technologies are becoming more and more sophisticated every day. And while we debate what should be done, these technologies are moving faster and faster. And so we’re saying we need to actually get ahead of this ourselves and put workers out in front.

So, you’re still in the information-gathering phase from your members?

We are beginning drafting on the worker protections piece of this. And we’ve been at this at the state level for several years now. So we’re moving on both fronts at the state legislative level and then also preparing for the federal level. But we can take lessons learned from what we’ve experimented with in these state legislative laboratories, right? And we were successful in California passing four guardrail types of bills that start to scratch the surface of what’s needed.

This legislative session will be expanding on that at the state level and taking a more holistic approach with our state and local AFL-CIO bodies to get in the halls of power at the state level and start going on offense.

With a lot of the anti-data-center sentiment and a lot of the AI anxiety that’s going into these elections, do you think there could be bipartisan support for some of the stuff that you’re talking about?

Yes, I do. I was thinking about this recently, about in the ’90s when we went through this period of deindustrialization due to trade policy. And you know this better than anyone, right? That with the offshoring and manufacturing leaving the country, the good high-road union jobs that you didn’t need a college degree for went away. And there were a whole host of people — thousands of people — that were left basically on their own. We had no safety net, no pathways for good jobs to transition to. I mean, there was [Trade Adjustment Assistance] that was completely inadequate. So, what did we learn from that experience?

Mostly, people were like, “Oh, manufacturing. That’s yesteryear. We’re moving on to better jobs.” And we ended up actually in a situation where people were piecing together jobs in retail and the service sector and never could recover from what they lost. And so now, fast-forward to today, with the disruption we’re going to be seeing with AI and these technologies: There’s going to be a whole host of white-collar workers, young people who are graduating college with tons of debt, that can’t find a job. A lot of women in back-office jobs that were supporting their families with payroll and accounting and call center work. They are going to be the first to feel these impacts.

It’s a whole different conversation now that we’re talking about white-collar work, and I say that to say that people are waking up to this in a different way now, and it is crossing party lines. It is crossing people’s backgrounds and class. And so I think it is ripe for coalition-building in unconventional ways because people have a common fight.

You mentioned TAA a minute ago, and I do wonder: Have we actually learned concrete lessons from what happened on trade? The general takeaway was basically, there were winners and losers from trade, and society didn’t do enough to support the losers. But is there actually an answer of what you do to prevent that from happening again?

Yeah, this is part of our “gold standard.” We want to come up with the policy levers learning from that experience. People talk about climate transition, a just transition. Well, we need that kind of just transition for people who are displaced as a result of AI and technology.

Experimenting with things like wage replacement, where you can bridge people while they’re pursuing a pathway to a new career. Thinking about levers that we can institute around employers and the fact that employers are operating in a system where they have zero incentive to keep workers on their payroll. They look at AI as a tool to essentially shed workers and cut costs and capture productivity gains using technology that just improves their bottom line and their profitability. They’re not thinking about, “Oh, well, maybe I can hang on to this employee and help them transition to another type of job that’s AI-enabled.” That’s not the instinct of most employers.

So, are there policy levers, for example, that we could institute that creates a higher threshold for employers to be firing people? These are the kinds of ideas that we’re working on now.

Most people don’t have the luxury of being able to train full time and be able to support their families. Are there ways that we can support and sustain people as they learn a new field or they’re plussing up their skills for the next thing? As a society, we should be thinking about, what kinds of investments are we prepared to make, having been through this before?

And this is definitely going to be something we’ll be talking about as the presidential candidates start to emerge as well. This is our litmus test. It’s like, “Are you with us, the workers, or are you with the Big Tech billionaires?” It’s a which-side-are-you-on moment.

I wanted to ask you about that. What are the topics that you will be pressing 2028 candidates on the most?

Well, the affordability issues, the kitchen-table economic issues are not going away.

This is going to continue into 2027, and then certainly if you layer on the AI impacts, it’s going to be a 2028 issue.

We will continue to beat the drum on the fact that people need a raise. The minimum wage has not been raised. People need to be able to join unions and not be fired, like they are under these broken labor laws, and be able to get a first contract once they do unionize. Because employers, they stall, and they have no consequences so just drag their feet.

Things like health care, where we are in a completely broken system and costs continue to skyrocket. Health care and housing are two of the most salient issues, I would say, for people when we talk to workers about what keeps them up at night — and then, of course, immigration, because we have seen the policies of today that are completely broken. Our hope for comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship continues to be alive, and we’ll continue to fight for that.

And then the AI of it all I think will take front and center stage as 2028 takes shape.

Assuming Democrats do well on Tuesday, where would you like to see them focus their oversight agenda?

There’s a lot of discussion about the oversight piece. I think we should be spending more time delivering on what we talked about on the campaign trail, which is, real impacts for working people.

We need to make sure that we’re bringing down costs, we’re raising people’s wages, we’re expanding health care. Making sure that people can join a union. That’s how we actually will show that we’ve made a difference. And that agenda is what I think people are hungry for.

Oversight of the Trump administration is important, of course, and actually, corruption is one of the issues that’s really been bubbling out on the campaign trail. Mainly because people are watching the rich and the powerful become more rich and powerful while they’re struggling to pay their bills. And I think that self-dealing is a huge driver for people. So that’s definitely a piece of what [we] probably will be seeing in the next Congress. But we just want to make sure that the economic issues stay front and center.

Early races to watch

The early races to watch to see whether the blue wave is coming

Aaron Pellish

We could have a clear sense of whether Democrats successfully built a blue wave before 9 p.m. Eastern time.

We can’t predict exactly which states will be called first. But some races that will likely report early returns will be the canary in the coal mine of a potentially disastrous night for Republicans.

They could also offer a signal on when the big call will be made: AP hasn’t called control of the House within 24 hours of polls closing since 2018, the last time Democrats rode a blue wave to flip the chamber.

Parts of Kentucky and Indiana will close their polls first at 6 p.m. If Democrats come out strong in the battleground Kentucky race between Democrat Zach Dembo and Republican Ralph Alvarado and the Indiana seat held by GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz, a pair of seats Donald Trump won by more than 15 points two years ago, it could be the first sign that a blue wave is coming.

The first state to post comprehensive results will likely be Florida, where polls fully close at 8 p.m. and votes are usually processed quickly as most of the state’s polls are closed by 7 p.m. The state has a history of defying national electoral trends. But a trio of Florida House races that Republicans would be expected to win handily — the Orlando-area seat being vacated by GOP Rep. Cory Mills, the Kissimmee-area seat held by Democratic Rep. Darren Soto redrawn to Republicans’ advantage, and the South Florida seat held by GOP Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar — could give an early sense of how deep the bottom is for Republicans. And if Democrats are flipping Florida’s governorship or Senate seat, a hurricane might be a better description than a wave.

Another group of frontline House battlegrounds in Florida will indicate the extent to which major spending by Republicans may help stave off the political headwinds of a bad environment. The South Florida district that Democrats are hoping Rep. Jared Moskowitz can hold, the Tampa-area seat held by Rep. Kathy Castor, and the open Fort Myers-area seat redrawn by the GOP are all among the most expensive House races of the cycle.

A huge margin for Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff and North Carolina Democrat Roy Cooper in the Senate races, wins for Democrats in the Georgia governor’s race or in Democratic Rep. Don Davis’ battleground North Carolina seat, or strong showings in South Carolina’s Senate race or the Charleston-anchored Republican-held House seat would all spell a bad night for Republicans. Democratic overperformance in a trio of House races in Virginia (VA-01, VA-02 and VA-05) could be a signal for a blue wave when polls close there at 7:30 p.m.

Early returns out of Ohio, whose polls close at 7:30 p.m., could hint at how other key Midwest races will unfold later in the night. On top of the battleground Senate race and the controversy-laden governor’s race, Republicans are fighting to hold on to embattled GOP Rep. Max Miller’s suburban Cleveland seat, Rep. Mike Carey’s (R-Ohio) Columbus-area district, and Rep. Mike Turner’s (R-Ohio) Dayton seat amid significant spending efforts from Democrats.

The GOP is also hoping to flip the seats of Democratic Reps. Marcy Kaptur and Greg Landsman, whose strong campaigns have weakened advantages Republicans gained from mid-decade redistricting in the state.

He is the threat

‘He is the threat’: Dem AGs brace for Trump moves after polls close

Kyle Cheney

They’ve spent months “war gaming” and “table-topping” for this moment. Now Democratic state attorneys general are bracing for the real thing: running an election while President Donald Trump controls the levers of federal power.

Democratic attorneys general say that where once foreign powers and overseas cyber threats were their primary concern, today it’s federal agencies being run by a man who has famously refused to accept election results when he or his allies lose.

“He is the threat,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in an interview. “He’s the interference.”

Courts in recent weeks have brushed back the administration’s attempts to force California to sequester ballots, block certification in Alaska and threaten election workers nationwide with criminal prosecution.

“President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said.

“While extreme Democrats and the media continue to dismiss concerns about voter fraud, the Trump Administration is taking decisive action to protect our elections including prosecuting election crimes, strengthening election infrastructure security, and protecting vulnerable voters from fraud and coercion. Anyone who illegally votes in our elections will be held accountable,” Bis said.

Bonta said he’s confident states are ready to respond to the administration’s actions. But he said two things are still keeping him up at night: The prospect that federal agencies will seek to seize or sequester ballots from local election officials before they are counted; and the potential presence of federal agents or military near polling places.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said he’s also confident the elections will go smoothly, but he has a different fear than Bonta’s: rogue county election officials. Though the vast majority of election workers, Brown said, do their jobs honorably under increased pressure and scrutiny, he said some had taken a page from Trump’s book on election fraud.

“I worry a lot about a number of people I would consider election deniers in positions of authority,” Brown said in an interview.

Bonta and Brown both lamented that a once-close relationship between the states and the Justice Department had frayed.

“The Department of Justice … under Republican and Democratic administrations used to be the greatest aid to local and state governments,” Brown said. “I think, unquestionably, it’s 180 degrees different.”

DOJ restrictions

Trump admin’s win short-lived as appeals court restores DOJ restrictions overnight

Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein

In a rush of overnight activity, a federal appeals court left in place extensive restrictions on the Justice Department’s ability to pressure states to adopt the Trump administration's preferred ballot security measures.

Late Monday, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a lower court’s order that blocked DOJ’s election-eve activities, including letters and public comments that local election workers viewed as threats of criminal prosecution if they refused to abide by the administration’s demands. Trump administration officials celebrated the ruling as a victory for their efforts to crack down on state voting procedures and pursue cases of illegal voting by noncitizens.

But their exuberance was short-lived. Less than three hours later, the full bench of the 9th Circuit reversed the three-judge panel, restoring the nationwide restrictions U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson imposed on DOJ last week.

The dizzying action by typically glacial appeals courts led to confusion among Trump allies — many of whom continued to celebrate the appeals panel’s ruling even as polls were opening Tuesday.

The 9th Circuit's late-night order sending the case to an 11-judge court for a so-called en banc rehearing is not a final ruling even on DOJ's emergency request to stay Thompson's order.

However, the vote put her order back into effect just as Election Day began and means that — barring further action from the appeals court or the Supreme Court — DOJ will have to refrain from pressuring election officials as ballot counting ramps up.

Property and the wealthy

Taxes on property and the wealthy on the ballot across the country

Bernie Becker

California's wealth tax vote is the clear main event among today’s various state ballot measures.

Proposition 40, imposing a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, has attracted plenty of attention, being viewed as a proxy for how the idea might fare on the national level — and as a danger that the state’s uber-wealthy have spent millions on beating back.

The outlook for wealth tax supporters has dimmed in the runup to Election Day.

But Prop 40 is also far from the only tax question before voters across the country Tuesday, as the U.S. faces both a broad potential revolt against property taxes and continues to test its willingness to tax the rich.

Here’s a primer on where to look tonight on these state ballot measures:

Colorado voters will decide the future of the state’s income tax with dueling measures. One would impose a progressive state income tax, raising rates on those making over a half-million dollars a year and raising funds for education and health care initiatives. The other would mandate the state’s flat income tax rate doesn’t exceed its current of 4.4%.

Progressive groups have rallied behind the graduated income tax measure, Amendment 87, which would install a new top rate of 8.4%.

But it hasn’t picked up support from Colorado’s current Democratic governor, Jared Polis, and the Democratic candidate favored to succeed him, Phil Weiser.

Polis has argued in recent interviews that a higher top state income tax rate would hurt Colorado’s ability to attract new employers. Weiser, currently the state’s attorney general, has said he has concerns about how the proceeds from the progressive income tax would be spent and what would happen if both ballot measures are somehow approved.

Meanwhile, voters in Washington will face a more straightforward decision: Whether to keep the state’s first-ever personal income tax, a 9.9% levy on income over $1 million that Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson signed into law earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Tuesday’s marquee vote on property taxes comes in Florida. The state’s GOP leadership has made property tax relief a top priority, and the measure that made it on the state ballot would increase the amount of a home’s value that’s exempt from property taxes.

Skeptics of the plan say it would starve localities of needed revenue, particularly considering that Florida doesn’t have an income tax. And as with other Florida ballot measures, the proposed property tax overhaul, Amendment 3, needs to get 60% of the vote to pass.

Jared Walczak of the right-leaning Tax Foundation told POLITICO that the Florida proposal will probably give the best sense of the nation’s mood on property taxes, which have faced an increasing recent backlash.

Voters in several other states will be weighing in on property tax ballot measures Tuesday. Analysts are keeping an eye on proposals in both Oklahoma and Wyoming. Rita Jefferson of the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said the Wyoming initiative was particularly concerning, because the state’s lawmakers just expanded the homestead exemption last year to 25% on home values up to $1 million. Initiative 1, being decided Tuesday, would double the exemption to 50% for primary residences of any value.

End billions of dollars in military aid to Israel

Trump says he will end billions of dollars in military aid to Israel

Congress will likely need to weigh in on any decision between the U.S. and Israeli leaders.

By Ben Johansen and Paul McLeary

President Donald Trump declared Tuesday that the U.S. will end nearly $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of the year, setting up a possible standoff with Congress after the midterm elections.

The president said on “Fox and Friends” that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed “months ago” to stop the aid.

“They’re fine with it because they’ve become a very successful country,” the president said. “They don’t need it. And we won’t be paying anymore. … By the end of this year, we won’t be paying Israel. We’ll help Israel if they need it. They’ve been a great ally.”

The Israeli embassy could not immediately be reached for comment. The Pentagon and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The announcement could portend a significant shift in the U.S.-Israel relationship, which has long been underpinned by billions of dollars in American military assistance. Under a 10-year agreement signed during the Obama administration, the U.S. committed to providing Israel with $38 billion in military aid between fiscal years 2019 and 2028.

The agreement is not set to expire until 2028, raising questions about how the administration intends to end the assistance two years early and whether Congress would need to approve the change.

In the interview Tuesday morning, Trump said that the annual assistance to Israel is a “bad talking point” for Democrats, including Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. “The left uses the $4 billion payment … as a signal of unfairness. And we can’t allow that to happen. I don’t like that. … It’s almost too easy to target.”

The vast majority of that military funding comes in the form of financing that allows Israel to buy U.S. military equipment. In the first year of the 10-year Obama deal, 75% was mandated to be spent in the U.S. And by 2026, more than 90% of that money was directed to American defense companies, essentially never leaving the U.S.

Traditionally, the $3.8 billion in financing includes $3.3 billion in foreign military financing and another $500 million for cooperative missile defense programs. The funding counts for less than 1% of the annual U.S. federal budget.

Israel maintains its status as a major non-NATO ally, a designation which prioritizes it for arms sales and transfers of excess American military equipment.

Trump said the Israeli leader first broached the topic. According to Trump, Netanyahu said, “‘I think it would be appropriate if we don’t receive aid.’ Because he understands that this is one of their points of contention.”

Blame Trump

Republicans Can Blame Trump for Their Midterm Woes

Tariffs, a costly war and political vendettas have left Republicans scrambling to defend their congressional majorities.

By Jonathan Martin

When it becomes clear Tuesday night or Wednesday morning that Republicans have taken “a thumper,” to borrow Bill Clinton’s phrase, President Donald Trump will lunge for scapegoats.

Trump will claim Republican candidates should have embraced him more, that Democrats cheated and that their losses could have been avoided if only Senate GOP Leader John Thune had waved a big, beautiful wand and passed a voter ID bill.

Don’t believe a word of it.

Presidents from both parties have suffered midterm shellackings, but never until 2026 has a president been so single-handedly responsible for the wave that’s about to crash over the GOP.

Trump owns this upcoming defeat — and he seemed determined to prove as much by using election eve to stand in front of the Reflecting Pool and remind every undecided voter that he’s more interested in his vanity projects than their needs.

By commission and omission, he kneecapped Republican candidates, torpedoed the party brand and allowed a leaderless opposition mired in factional fights to stage a Truman ’48-style comeback two years after they lost every swing state. After forging a diverse 2024 coalition that, if it held, would have broken the back of the Democratic Party, Trump showed no interest in sustaining the alliance he had created. It will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in American political history.

The story of this midterm will be written by the voters who Trump drove away from his column — Black, Hispanic and young people, and the Republicans who tolerated his buffoonery as long as he kept the economy afloat and didn’t plunge the country into costly wars.

He did neither. And when the election season neared, he sent his party toward machine gun nests armed with butter knives.

To this day, could a single elected Republican tell you what their agenda is for the next two years? There was no plan, no platform and no vision — a party left to one man’s hourly whims.

In fact, the most coherent proposal presented by Trump this year was straight bribery. Or, to be more creative in the Chicago spirit, ex post facto walking-around money. What else to call the president’s September stunner, which caught the ostensible GOP congressional leaders by surprise, that if Republicans retained power they’d dust off every American adult with $5,000. Vote GOP, and you can get your beak wet — not exactly from the Adam Smith canon, was it?

The only actual consistent message the rest of the fall from the office of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln is that Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) has a nice ass.

But let’s back up.

The big-ticket items are as glaring as they were entirely avoidable: tariffs; a war of choice that sent gas prices soaring; and frittering away his best issue, immigration, by sending ICE agents to restaurant kitchens and suburban rooftops as if they had just hopped out the chopper in Abbottabad in search of Osama bin Laden.

Trump then compounded these mistakes by largely flooring it past innumerable off-ramps to lessen the political damage he had brought upon himself and Republicans with these decisions.

He has instead focused on a series of Washington-area property renovations, decorations and dedications to himself. These projects are amusing to snicker about, and perhaps the most benign way for Trump to spend his time, but they of course only hurt his party’s fortunes. The obsession tells voters about his priorities. As I wrote late last year, these are 12-year-old boy indulgences, Tom Hanks in “Big” and ice cream sundaes for dinner stuff.

Yet Trump does enjoy the power game elements of politics. So let’s tally up the bill he ran up for Republicans this election cycle.

First, he insisted on a mid-decade gerrymander scheme — one that few in Congress craved — to protect the House majority. This, inevitably, prompted Democrats in blue states to do the same with their boundaries, largely mitigating potential gains. But it also, just as inevitably, angered Black voters who saw the power grab as potentially diluting their power (same as when they saw the unceremonious firing of a series of Black general officers in the military). In slicing the lines thinner, Trump’s lieutenants also imperiled GOP incumbents who were pushed into a brutal election season with fewer Republican voters on offer.

And what about the Senate, which at the start of 2025 seemed sure to remain in GOP hands given the seemingly friendly map this year? Well, let’s start with the only two of 22 states Republicans were defending this year that Trump didn’t win by double digits in 2024 (yes, you read that right).

Trump ran off North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis in 2025 over a legislative spat, and once Tillis announced his retirement, why, it sure became easier to lure former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper into the race. Who did Trump choose as the Tillis replacement in a state full of ambitious Republicans? After his daughter-in-law, Lara, declined the job, he turned to his RNC chairman, who had next to zero profile with North Carolina voters.

Then there’s Maine, where Sen. Susan Collins has defied political gravity for thirty years in the sprawling and trade-heavy state. But that got a lot harder this year with the spike in diesel prices, an ICE agents shooting a man in Biddeford and then Trump’s late-summer decision to revive a trade war with Canada and attempt to rename Lake Ontario.

But surely, Republicans would hold the majority as long as they retained red states such as Texas, Louisiana and South Carolina? Well, Trump pushed out multi-term incumbents in Texas and Louisiana, and then he turned a nice gesture — appointing the late Lindsey Graham’s sister to his seat — into a white-knuckle ride by nudging her to run for the full term.

Besides the repeated Senate interventions, Trump also used his time in party purges that demonstrated his intra-party strength but did nothing to ensure the party’s congressional majorities. Running off Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and a handful of Indiana state senators? Congratulations. Displays on the Battle of Fort Wayne will no doubt kill at the future Trump Library.

The flip side of his loyalty tests was undercutting his party’s Democrats-are-Bolsheviks messaging by repeatedly swooning over the most prominent democratic socialist in America, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Then there were those who didn’t run, in part because of their own choices but also because they didn’t want to bow and scrape to MAGA. Who-coulda-been is a long list, but let’s leave it at Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, whose decision effectively ensured Sen. Jon Ossoff’s re-election.

For those who did run, Trump’s idea of help was holding rallies with them, in which he droned on about good-looking guys in the crowd or how Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), locked in a must-win Senate race, had lost a lot of weight — without the help of GLP-1. You can’t make this stuff up.

Now, let’s give Trump Inc. some credit. They stopped the president from routinely ridiculing their most at-risk incumbent, Susan Collins.

And they didn’t sit on their war chest. The president allowed the money he had raised to be spent for his party’s candidates. The problem was that the green light didn’t come until after the summer, when it was clear after the collapse of the Iran MOU that Republicans were confronting a rising blue wave.

And what were he and his aides doing all year long?

Exacerbating voters’ biggest concerns: about the cost of living, immigration, corruption and data centers. Imagine if Trump had made a show of firing, say DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, instead of just shuffling her to another job. Or consider if he had told Stephen Miller who was really in charge. Or if Trump had offered grace to GOP governors facing pressure on data centers and in need of a special session to show their concern over the issue. Or, get this, what if he had cashiered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before the midterms and sent a statement about the war.

Speaking of sins of omission, I wrote this in August, and it looms even larger now: The biggest difference between this midterm and that in 2018 was the GOP lacked a good, base-motivating court fight.

How did Trump, not exactly a respecter of separation of powers norms, never offer Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito an offer they couldn’t refuse? Or even try.

It’s not as clean-cut with the Fed, because the markets may have revolted, but you would have thought this time last year Trump would pick a chair who shared his dovish views on interest rates and would have pushed for lower interest rates headed into the election.

I’ll end with this, as Peggy Noonan would say. In her column this past weekend, Noonan pleaded for a thorough and clean stomping to help begin the GOP’s reformation. It was the latest, and most public, example of what has been a recurring theme among Republican professionals: a quiet prayer for a good ass-kicking.

Thanks mostly to your great president, that wish is about to come true.

Bamm....

Judge says California doesn’t have to follow DOJ demands to segregate ballots

Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has barred the Trump administration from demanding that California officials set aside ballots from up to 20,000 registered voters who federal agencies have deemed likely to be noncitizens.

“The Executive Branch has likely violated the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which commits authority over election rules to the states and Congress alone,” Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote Monday. “California may decide for itself what procedures to use for verifying the citizenship of registered voters and for deciding whether to count their mail-in ballots.”

“Defendants’ flawed lists risk chilling or preventing lawful votes from being cast and counted,” Boasberg added.

Boasberg’s decision overlaps with a similar order issued by U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson, a California-based Biden appointee, who barred the Justice Department on Friday from making demands of any state to separate ballots based on claims of purportedly ineligible voters. The Justice Department has appealed Thompson’s order and has asked her to put it on hold during that appeal.

During a hearing Monday in San Francisco on that request, Thompson sounded troubled by concessions from a Justice Department attorney that the lists being sent to voting officials aren’t completely accurate.

“It may not be a perfect list,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kao said.

“If I’m hearing that the list is flawed and it’s overinclusive and includes individuals who are eligible to vote, that’s a problem,” the judge said. “Would you agree there’s a high error rate?”

“I think that’s a fair statement,” Kao said, adding that federal officials hoped state and local authorities would check it against their own data to help ensure “the purity of the vote.”

Boasberg’s ruling came in litigation brought by a civic group that contended many of its members were likely on the Trump administration’s list in California. The Obama-appointed judge granted the group, the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights, access to the list, and a pair of data scientists tapped by the group concluded it included a significant number of erroneous names.

Forget Donald Trump

Rick Jackson wants voters to forget Donald Trump

Gregory Svirnovskiy

As Rick Jackson barnstormed around Georgia on election eve, he kept emphasizing how he’ll continue the legacy of outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp — while avoiding mention of President Donald Trump.

Amidst stiff national headwinds, Jackson is looking to localize the governor’s race as much as possible in his swing state.

“In Georgia, a governor makes decisions every day that affect your life. And every day, our lives have been better for the last 24 years, but especially for the last four years,” he told voters at a Canton, Ga., restaurant on Monday morning. He then offered a veiled nod to voters’ fury at the president: “No matter what has happened in Washington, through two different presidents.”

“At the end of the day, a governor cannot control what happens at the national level,” said Garrison Douglas, spokesperson for Jackson. “All he can control is what happens at the state level and how we respond to those national and world events. And that’s what he’s talking about.”

Through two events Sunday and Monday – his major closing rally and a breakfast — the closest Jackson came to mentioning the president was when he credited Kemp for the $4 billion Audi plant Trump announced in a Perry, Ga., rally in late October.

“There’s no limit to what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit,” he said, giving a nod to the Trump White House for “help[ing] us at the end” but framing the effort as a long-term priority for Kemp.

Gubernatorial candidates saddled with unpopular presidents always push to localize their races. And sometimes, it works — just ask Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who won reelection in his red state in 2023 with Joe Biden in the White House.

And Jackson hasn’t abandoned Trump entirely. Ralph Reed, a onetime chair of the state GOP, pointed out that the billionaire healthcare executive appeared alongside the president at the October rally in Perry. Trump endorsed Jackson after his primary victory over the summer.

“The president has come in here repeatedly,” he said. “Rick has been, to my knowledge, if not at every one of those events, the overwhelming majority of them.”

But he’s clearly looking for distance from Trump, who endorsed Jackson’s primary opponent.

That strategy, said Eric Tanenblatt, a longtime Georgia Republican political operative, makes sense given the president’s lack of popularity within the broader electorate.

“You have a governor who's the most popular politician of either party,” he said. “I would think if you want to be successful, you should be wrapping yourself around Brian Kemp and talking about the issues that are state issues and staying away from those federal issues.”