On Tuesday, two survivors of child sex abuse accused the Justice Department of failing to notify dozens of victims found in Jeffrey Epstein’s massive collection of child sex images.
In a proposed class action, survivors explained that Epstein apparently started collecting child sex images in the 1990s, many of which the DOJ recovered after his arrest. In 2025, the FBI started reviewing “tens of thousands of videos” containing illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and issued a memo confirming that “a large volume of images” seized depicted likely minors.
Some of these victims may have had contact with Epstein, as the disgraced financier kept a "modelbook" of nude photos of young girls roped into his ring. However, the FBI also identified hundreds of CSAM images in cache, which include approximately 15–20 images of known CSAM dating back to the 1990s. And so far, the DOJ has largely ignored those victims, who likely never met Epstein and have no way of knowing if he possessed, transported, or traded their images, survivors alleged.
In July, a judge blocked as unconstitutional an immigration policy that the US relied on to weigh whether to detain and deport people who flag illegal or harmful online content as national security risks. In his announcement of the policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that by targeting a list of researchers—which he stood “ready and willing” to expand—the policy supposedly served to prevent foreign nationals from manipulating digital town squares and censoring Americans.
However, in his order siding with the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) and staying the policy, US District Judge James Boasberg said the US showed no evidence linking any targeted researchers to a foreign power that might be attempting to censor Americans or manipulate US public debate. Deemed too broad, the policy could sweep in seemingly any noncitizen working in content moderation, the judge said.
“The first reaction is horror,” is how the left-liberal Der Spiegel described the shocking victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the recent local elections.
The newspaper pointed to the historical significance of a party that does not draw a clear dividing line from Nazi Germany winning an election by such a large margin more than 80 years after the Nazi dictatorship.
Would Der Spiegel be able to make such a critical assessment if the AfD were in government and had the power to change the law?
The far-right party has long targeted Germany’s established media by undermining its credibility, threatening its funding and becoming a social media superpower to bypass traditional journalists entirely.
“We want to finally pull the plug on this woke, anti-German and manipulative influence,” said Ulrich Siegmund, the party’s parliamentary group co-leader in Saxony-Anhalt, when promising to “terminate” the public broadcasting agreement.
And it’s not just in Germany. Across Europe, right-wing governments have shown how political power can be used to reshape the rules governing the media, weaken independent journalism and make life increasingly difficult for outlets that scrutinise those in power.
And we are already seeing the warning signs here in Britain.
Just last week, Reform UK blocked a Left Foot Forward journalist from attending its party conference, claiming it was “overcapacity” for media applications, despite the party selling additional late-registration media passes for £100.
Other journalists who have investigated Reform were also refused passes, including Michael Crick, Peter Geoghegan, whose conference pass was rejected less than an hour after he published a story revealing how Isabel Oakeshott, the right wing journalist, had privately called Reform mega donor Christopher Harborne “untrustworthy.” The Guardian’s Anna Isaac, who broke the story about Nigel Farage accepting an undeclared £5m gift from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, was also refused a pass.
This is the party that routinely presents itself as a defender of free speech while portraying the media as part of an Establishment conspiracy against it.
When attacks become law
Russia provides the bleakest example of what happens when such parties have the power to change the rules governing the media.
Following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the government introduced laws criminalising what it deemed “knowingly spreading false information” or “discrediting” the military.
The legislation effectively destroyed what remained of Russia’s independent media. Outlets were forced to close or flee the country, while Novaya Gazeta suspended its coverage of the war because of fears the new laws would be used against its journalists.
As Professor Marko Milanovic of the University of Reading wrote: “The freedoms of speech and protest have been dying a long, slow death in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”
Hungary offers another example.
Viktor Orbán used his parliamentary majority to rewrite the constitution and introduce sweeping media laws. His government took control of public broadcasting while changing the legal and regulatory environment in ways that helped government-friendly oligarchs acquire private media.
Reporters Without Borders estimates that the Orbán government came to control around 80% of Hungary’s media outlets. The pattern is clear: first, discredit journalists as biased or hostile, then change the laws and institutions governing the media, and finally, use those powers to reshape what the public is allowed to see and hear.
Italy under Giorgia Meloni has also seen concerns over press freedom, including the use of defamation cases against journalists and public figures. Italy has fallen from 41st to 49th in the World Press Freedom Index since Meloni’s party came to power. When the European Commission flagged this in a rule of law report, Meloni accused left-leaning Italian media of twisting its findings. Last summer, the Italian prime minister was caught telling Donald Trump at the White House: “I never want to speak to my press.”
And as for Trump, since returning to office, he has used lawsuits, threats against broadcasters, restrictions on journalists’ access and the power of government agencies to put pressure on media organisations.
Last month, Walt Disney sued the Federal Communications Commission, accusing the Trump administration of launching a “retaliatory campaign” against its ABC television networks over their broadcasts. Trump has repeatedly called for the FCC to revoke ABC’s licences.
Reporters Without Borders has warned that Trump’s administration is not merely attacking journalism rhetorically but reducing the physical and institutional space in which journalists can operate.
“It’s a very basic tactic but a fundamental hit to press freedom,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA. “Just as he wants to control the narrative in print and on the airwaves using government pressure or lawsuits against media outlets, he’s also trying to control the narrative by restricting the press’s access to spaces where crucial decisions are made, avoiding transparency and accountability,”
A politician complaining about an unfavourable coverage is one thing, but when a government changes the law, controls regulators, threatens licences or turns the courts and state institutions against media organisations, the stakes are entirely different.
And what about Reform and its dubious ‘Free Speech Bill’?
Ahead of the 2024 general election, Reform pledged that a Reform-led government would begin reforming what it described as the “out-of-touch,” “wasteful” and “institutionally biased” BBC within 100 days of the next Parliament.
Its manifesto, rebranded as “our contract with you” rather than a manifesto, promised to scrap the TV licence, which it branded “taxation without representation”. “In a world of on-demand TV,” it declared, “people should be free to choose.”
The party also called for a Free Speech Bill, supposedly designed to protect “personal freedom and democracy,” while promising to legislate against what it described as “left-wing bias and politically correct ideology.” It pledged to put an end to “cancel culture,” “left wing hate mobs” and “political bias in public institutions.”
The contradiction is difficult to miss. Reform presents itself as the defender of free speech while simultaneously proposing to use legislation to combat viewpoints and ideas it considers too left-wing.
In his party conference speech last week, Nigel Farage pledged to eliminate “obstacles” to his plans, declaring he would use a “national emergency” if he wins power. He also threatened to overhaul the House of Lords and how judges are appointed if they stood in the way.
Identifying the judiciary as another potential “obstacle,” Farage promised to remove the judges’ ability to rely on conventions such as the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).
“Parliament makes the law, judges interpret the law. We will do whatever it takes, and perhaps have to consider how judicial appointments work in the future,” he said.
The ‘national emergency’ tactic is familiar in Trump’s America, where emergency powers have been used to justify sweeping changes to government and the law. Critics have warned that normalising the language of permanent crisis risks weakening democratic norms and giving governments greater scope to exercise extraordinary powers, including over the media.
“In any emergency-power regime, it’s crucial that the ‘emergency’ trigger be carefully defined and cautiously applied, lest the state of emergency become the new normal,” said David Pozen, a Columbia University law professor. “Yet that seems to be exactly what Trump wants – to govern in perpetual crisis model.”
And warnings about what a Reform government could mean for the free press and the laws governing are are also mounting.
In August, Labour’s Bridget Phillipson accused Reform deputy leader Richard Tice of a “chilling attempt to silence a free press” after he sent a legal threat to the Guardian over its reporting on his financial affairs.
The National Union of Journalists has also condemned Reform’s restrictions on journalists, urging all political parties to “demonstrate their commitment to media freedom and uphold the public’s right to be informed.”
Even Kemi Badenoch warned that the party’s behaviour could offer a glimpse of how it might govern.
“I think you could … [see] what kind of government they would be – authoritarian and using state power actually to pursue opponents is what they’ve effectively been threatening.
“We believe in free speech. We believe in a free press. And yes, of course, that might be painful for us as politicians, but public scrutiny is part of the gig. If Nigel Farage can’t handle difficult questions about his dodgy £5m then he shouldn’t be a politician.”
Farage’s complaints about the media are hardly convincing when so much of the right-wing press has spent years giving him and Reform a sympathetic platform.
But the victim narrative remains politically useful. Reform can cast itself as an outsider battling a hostile Establishment while simultaneously behaving like a political organisation that wants to control which journalists get access to it.
The crucial issue, however, is not whether Reform dislikes Left Foot Forward, the Guardian or any other publication.
It’s what happens if a party that regards critical journalism as an attack acquires the power to change the laws governing journalism itself.
Russia, Hungary and Trump’s America show why that question matters.
Free speech is not simply the right of politicians to say what they want.
It’s also the right of journalists to scrutinise those politicians, and the ability to do so without governments changing the law to punish them for it.
That is the real test of whether a government believes in a free press. And one Reform should be prepared to answer.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
ABC's Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission.
Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC's attacks on ABC and its owner, Disney. In his monologue last night, Kimmel said he'll be interviewing Democrat James Talarico, a state representative who is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for a seat in the US Senate.
In previous years, such an interview would have aired on the broadcast show via local stations throughout the country, Kimmel said. This time, it will only be on the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel in order to prevent further trouble for individual stations that hold FCC licenses, he said.
The United States has now named six Chinese AI firms accused of waging industrial-scale attacks distilling US frontier AI model capabilities and perhaps sparing billions in Chinese development costs.
In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have been attacking US models since at least late 2024. The firms “likely” acted with “Chinese government awareness” when extracting capabilities from US models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, agencies said.
“China-based AI companies that conduct industrial-scale distillation against US AI models see significantly shorter AI development timelines and reduced financial expenditures in training a frontier model,” agencies said.
An anti-immigration-themed adaptation of Tetris was removed from the White House website over the weekend. The move comes days after The Tetris Company disavowed any involvement with the game and said that it "take[s] copyright infringement very seriously."
The White House's "Build the Wall" game asked players to stop a "Zombie Border siege" by stacking Tetris-styled bricks in an attempt to "hold the line." Unlike in Tetris, though, the blocks in "Build the Wall" don't disappear when you complete a line, meaning each brick contributes to an impassable barrier for the pixel-art "zombies" marching in from the "Southern Border." That change makes the gameplay pretty uninteresting for anything but cheap propaganda, and it also means that every game quickly and ironically ends with a "Border Breached" message when the blocks inevitably fill up the well.
Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of Texas migrant rights group Frontera Federation, told AFP last week that the makers of the game "have lost touch with what it means to be human and care for others."
The Trump administration’s attempt to punish AI company Anthropic after it refused to allow its technology to be used for autonomous warfare and mass surveillance has been ruled illegal by a federal judge, exposing the administration’s claim that the company posed a national security threat as little more than retaliation against a critic.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, was blacklisted by the Trump administration after a dispute over how its technology could be used by the US government and military. The company had refused to remove restrictions on the use of its AI models for lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans.
Rather than accept those limits, the Trump administration responded by taking sweeping measures against the company.
In March, Anthropic sued the administration, arguing that it had been designated a national security supply-chain risk in retaliation for exercising its First Amendment rights. The company said it had the right to express its views to both the public and the government about how its AI services should be used and about AI safety.
It also argued that the government had failed to follow procedures set out by Congress when designating it a supply-chain risk.
The court has now sided with Anthropic, finding that the government illegally retaliated against the company by designating it a supply-chain risk to national security.
The ruling vacated the government’s actions and ordered the administration to rescind its directives against Anthropic.
Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered federal agencies to permanently stop using Anthropic’s products and barred defence contractors from doing business with the company, including business unrelated to military work.
Judge Rita Lin rejected the administration’s justification for those actions.
“Though the Department of War is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice, the evidence demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless,” Lin wrote. “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”
For an administration that has repeatedly presented political disagreement as a threat to national security while portraying its opponents as part of some amorphous “radical left,” the White House’s response to Anthropic’s lawsuit was as predictable as they come.
“President Trump will never allow a radical left, woke company to jeopardise our national security by dictating how the greatest and most powerful military in the world operates,” it said.
And for all the Trump administration’s talk of fighting “woke” corporations, the episode raises the question: who, exactly, is being ideological when a government responds to a company’s concerns about the use of its technology by attempting to destroy its access to government business?
On the evidence of this ruling, it was not Anthropic that overstepped the line.
As Britain surfaces from a summer of prolonged drought, record heat and wildfires, the evidence is becoming harder to ignore. Climate change is increasing the likelihood of the extreme heat and dry conditions that make wildfires more common and dangerous.
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that human activity is driving climate change, yet the right-wing media appears determined to find almost anything else to blame.
Their latest target is rewilding, the restoration of ecosystems by allowing vegetation and natural processes to return with less human intervention. Their argument is that allowing vegetation to grow has created vast ‘tinderboxes’ and that environmental policies are therefore responsible for Britain’s worsening wildfire problem.
There is a serious discussion to be had about how land should be managed to reduce fire risk, but turning that discussion into a conspiracy about rewilding is another matter entirely. It also creates a notable contradiction. Newspapers claiming to defend ‘evidence-based’ land management are promoting a narrative that ignores much of the scientific evidence about what is actually driving extreme wildfire conditions.
The Telegraph’s rewilding blame game
When a 371-acre wildfire began at the RSPB’s Minsmere reserve in Suffolk before spreading to National Trust-owned Dunwich Heath, the Telegraph sought to pin the blame on ‘rewilding.’
The paper reported claims that the area had become a ‘tinderbox’ because of the RSPB’s ‘rewilding agenda,’ quoting Countryside Alliance chief executive Tim Bonner, whose organisation has consistently opposed rewilding.
Bonner accused organisations of refusing to manage vegetation because of ‘political ideology’ and an ‘obsession with rewilding.’
Yet the organisations actually responsible for managing the land gave a very different explanation.
The RSPB said the summer’s fires were “unprecedented in scale, driven by drought and prolonged heat exacerbated by climate change.”
The National Trust likewise pointed to prolonged drought and exceptionally low rainfall across England and Wales.
The Trust’s communications director Celia Richardson summed up the absurdity: “Some of the oldest surviving heathland in the UK burns in unprecedented temperatures and Telegraph headline says “rewilding” is to blame.”
There is an obvious problem with treating vegetation management as the primary explanation for catastrophic fires. Devastating wildfires have also occurred on intensively managed land. Scotland’s first recorded ‘megafire,’ at Dava on a managed grouse moor in June 2025, is one example.
And talking of grouse land. A recent article in the Murdoch-owned Times headlined “Wildfires suggest rewilding needs a rethink,” claims that “Green enthusiasm for ignoring the old-fashioned thinning and clearing of land does create habitats – and kindling.”
But there is a wider vested interest behind this particular vision of ‘traditional’ land management. Grouse moors are managed to support driven grouse shooting, a pursuit associated with Britain’s wealthy landowners and the ultra-rich, for whom vast swathes of upland Britain are maintained as private shooting estates.
That matters because much of this land is managed through intensive heather burning. Environmental campaigners have long argued that such burning can damage peatlands, which are naturally wet ecosystems that store carbon and support a wide range of wildlife.
So, when the right-wing press present burning and intensive management as the sensible alternative to rewilding, it’s worth asking whose interests that version of ‘sensible’ land management serves.
Climate science tells us that higher temperatures dry out vegetation and make it more flammable.
Indeed, there is evidence that some forms of ecological restoration can make landscapes more resilient to extreme weather. Rewilding can increase carbon storage, restore water-retaining soils and wetlands, provide shade and diversify vegetation.
Rewetting peatlands can also reduce the continuity of flammable vegetation. RSPB senior policy officer Tom Aspinall has explained that burning can encourage heather, an oily highly flammable plant, while rewetting and diversification can introduce a wider range of vegetation and disrupt the ability of fires to spread.
A balanced debate?
In response to a front-page story in the Daily Mail claiming that ‘eco-dogma’ and Labour’s environmental policies had caused the record number of UK wildfires, Rachel Millward, deputy leader of the Green Party, accused the newspaper of “turning reality on its head” by blaming rewilding while denying readers the facts about climate change.
“This is another deeply irresponsible headline from a deeply irresponsible newspaper,” she told Left Foot Forward. “The Mail seeks to blame the climate crisis on anything other than its main cause – burning fossil fuels.”
There is, of course, a legitimate debate about whether particular landscapes are being managed in the best possible way.
University of York associate professor Andreas Heinemeyer, who has studied UK moorland ecology for 15 years, widens the discussion to include the common practice of vegetation control through burning. He argues that the supposed conflict between those who support burning and those who oppose it has become a “false culture war.”
For Heinemeyer, policy should be based on “unbiased and robust evidence” rather than “false and misleading claims about burning.”
Amen to that but there seems little prospect of the right-wing media presenting a balanced discussion any time soon.
Trump’s war on conservation
And such misinformation isn’t confined to Britain. As with so many of the culture wars peddled by the right, the inspiration comes from across the Atlantic, where the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal recently ran an editorial arguing green policies were fuelling fires in Europe.
It’s a depressingly common thread. When wildfires become more frequent and extreme, the right-wing media repeatedly looks for an environmental policy to blame, anything, it seems, except the fossil fuel emissions driving global warming.
Donald Trump has taken a similar approach to environmental protection in the US.
His administration has rolled back protections covering huge areas of public land and weakened conservation safeguards. He has repeatedly attacked environmental regulations as the work of “radical climate activists,” including complaining that endangered-species protections have placed land off limits to development and even military training.
The same political instinct is visible on both sides of the Atlantic, to portray environmental protection as an ideological project, then use environmental problems as evidence that environmental protection has failed.
But the consequences of weakening habitat protections are not ideological. Habitat loss remains a leading driver of extinction. The Rewilding Institute has warned that rolling back habitat protections removes the foundations needed for ecosystems and wildlife to recover.
France’s far right exploits the fires while opposing green policy
The same contradiction is playing out in France which suffered a summer of record heat. By the end of July, the area burned by wildfires had already broken the annual record.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally has spent years opposing green regulations. Yet the party seized on France’s worst blazes in years to accuse President Emmanuel Macron’s government of failing in one of its most basic duties, protecting people and their homes.
As Politico noted: “As France has sweltered through record heat, the National Rally has so far paid little political price for its lack of credibility on climate and environmental policy.”
Rather than addressing the causes of climate change, the party focused on adaptation, how governments can protect people from its consequences. During a June heatwave, for example, it proposed financial assistance for installing air conditioning in homes and public buildings, presenting the measure as an immediate response to concerns about health and safety.
It is a familiar political manoeuvre: exploit the consequences of a warming climate while sidestepping the policies needed to tackle its causes.
The French example makes clear that this is not simply a British media obsession with rewilding. Across the right, climate impacts are increasingly being used to attack environmental policy, even when the policies being attacked are aimed at addressing the underlying crisis.
Follow the evidence not the culture war
The Met Office says 2026 is on course to be the hottest UK summer on record. Temperatures reached 38.1°Cat in Kew Gardens, while 2026 became the first year on record in which temperatures reached at least 35°C in May, June and July. A summer this hot has been made around 130 times more likely by human-induced climate change, according to the Met Office.
Dr Stephen Cumbers, a medical doctor and chartered scientist, summed up the implications:
“None of this means every wildfire, death or hot day can simply be labelled ‘climate change’,” he wrote. “Nor does the evidence dictate a single policy programme. But it does make continued delay increasingly difficult to justify.”
His conclusion should be the starting point for the debate.
“The message to government should be neither alarmism nor complacency.
“Take the evidence seriously. Be honest about the risks and costs. And make energy and climate decisions on evidence rather than short-term political convenience.”
There is nothing wrong with questioning how particular landscapes are managed, or examining whether controlled burning, grazing, rewetting and other interventions can reduce wildfire risk.
What is wrong is turning that legitimate scientific and ecological debate into a political conspiracy in which rewilding is blamed for a wildfire crisis occurring amid record heat and drought.
The right-wing media’s argument ultimately collapses under its own contradiction. It demands that environmentalists “follow the evidence” while repeatedly ignoring the evidence when it points towards climate change.
Britain might need better land management, but it also needs an honest conversation about what is making wildfires worse.
Blaming rewilding won’t make the climate crisis disappear. In the meantime, the debate (or lack of debate) does feel like those astronomical arguments of the early modern period. Long after scientists and seafarers had proved that the earth was round and went round the sun, there were still those who insisted on the opposite. Are climate change deniers the flat earthers of our time?
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
Why does President Trump seem so unconcerned about the fast-approaching midterm elections? He is deeply unpopular, yet he dismisses widespread anxiety about the war with Iran, “affordability,” higher prices, tariffs, diminished access to healthcare and the trade war with Canada, which will contribute to inflation. It is as if he is living in a bubble, which he may be.
It is by no means irrational or hyperbolic to fear that Trump is not interested in how voters feel because he sees other paths to ensure he does not face a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives or the Senate, or both, on January 3, 2027.
It is not hard to imagine a tiered Republican strategy for the midterms:
win at the polls, with the help of redrawn maps and turbo-charged gerrymandering, voter suppression tactics and disinformation campaigns – all familiar though amplified;
prepare to use federal emergency powers and other instruments of power to reduce access to voting in places that will underpin Democratic victories; and
prepare to contest the election results in the House via the certification process at the state level and in Congress to avoid seating a majority of Democrats on January 3, 2027.
There is little doubt that the elections will be subject to significant external pressures. We just do not know which tactic or swarm of tactics candidates, state election officials, election workers, the courts, law enforcement, civil society and, ultimately, voters will need to confront and counter over the coming months. House and Senate Democrats, election officials and administrators, civil society groups, among others, all have conducted tabletop exercises to identify and evaluate the threats and vulnerabilities by voting district, understand how countermeasures will need to be deployed; and once voting starts, monitor where threat actors are operating and deploy appropriate countermeasures.
There is no American playbook to follow. While voter suppression has been a feature of our system for some time, what is new and worrying is that we have a federal government that, having seized unprecedented executive power, is the single greatest threat to free and fair elections. We know the threat is not hypothetical as we already have seen myriad election-related efforts undertaken in plain sight to subvert the midterms.
Surveying the landscape, Trump and/or his administration:
Pivoted from one tactic to the next. When the Supreme Court pushed back on Trump’s deployments of National Guard (suggesting, though not ensuring that they would not be deployed during the midterms), and as his mid-decade redistricting effort largely failed to ensure the Republicans would hold the House, he directed his Attorney General to seize ballot boxes, with varying justifications. Is this just about showing there is little that can stop him, while seeding doubt in the minds of American citizens about election security and privacy of voting decisions? Or let’s drill deeper and consider the following: the seizure of specific voting machines in Georgia and Puerto Rico, ostensibly to prove the machines were vulnerable to foreign interference, are deemed vulnerable and decertified, forcing election officials to count ballots manually.
Calledfor voter ID for the midterms, “whether approved by Congress or not!”Trump went on to say, “the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel.” He then issued a second post threatening to act by Executive Order.
Called on Republicans to “nationalize” elections and “take over voting” in 15 unspecified locations.
Continued to repeat the baseless claim that the 2020 election was tainted by massive and widespread fraud, and in June called for the appointment of a special prosecutor – “The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!” Trump continues to double down on the debunked allegations that the 2020 was “rigged and stolen.”
Moved to curtail mail-in voting. Last summer,Trump resurrected his quixotic campaign against mail-in ballots (after toning it down last year at the request of Republican candidates, who ended up benefitting from mail-in ballots and early voting), reportedly after speaking with Putin. Let’s pause on that for a moment – recall Trump at the Helsinki summit took Putin at his word that Russia did not seek to influence the 2016 election, going against at the time the unanimous views of the U.S. intelligence community. And now he is taking election security advice from Putin!
First on social media and then during an Oval Office question-and-answer session with reporters, Trump pledged to “lead a movement” to eliminate “corrupt” mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. He exclaimed, “Mail-in ballots are corrupt; you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots. It’s the only way [Democrats] can get elected.”
Trump issued an Executive Order to rein in mail-in voting. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted, the Constitution explicitly empowers only Congress and the states to set the rules for elections. The Executive Order seeks to sidestep that limitation and displace states’ mail-in voting laws by transforming the U.S. Postal Service “from a neutral mail carrier to an arbiter of who may cast a ballot by mail.” The order also requires DHS to build and give to each state a list of citizens eligible to vote, and given that federal databases are out-of-date and unreliable, this risks mass disenfranchisement of eligible voters.
Administration efforts responsive to the Executive Order have been challenged in the courts, and injunctions to block implementation of the order have been issued by two lower courts. The Supreme Court just lifted one of those two injunctions. But the Court did not declare the Executive Order legal, so watch this space.
Moved aggressively to seize voter rolls in states. The administration is pressing state election officials across the country to provide sensitive information about voters. The requests include copies of statewide voter registration lists and ballots from prior elections, as well as access to voting equipment. DoJ has sued more than 20 states and D.C., for not complying. As the Brennan Center has noted, the requests cover sensitive, private information such as driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. These demands raise privacy and security concerns and may violate state and federal laws. They are unprecedented and a clear encroachment on the power of states to run elections as set out in the Constitution. As Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly set out in her ruling, the Constitution gives “no role at all to the President” in setting election rules. To date, DoJ is 0-23 in its efforts to get states to turn over voter rolls, though it is appealing rulings at pace.
Pushed aggressively to get the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act¸which would have mandated proof of citizenship (a passport or birth certificate) to register or register to vote.
Weaponized the DoJ to serve his own ends, including by gutting the Civil Rights Division. Political appointees have removed all the senior managers in the voting section and ordered the dismissal of every major active voting rights case, including lawsuits challenging restrictive voting laws and gerrymandered maps in Arizona, Georgia, and Texas. The head of the Division, Harmeet Dhillon, has shifted the Division from countering racial discrimination in voting to prioritizing Trump goals of voter suppression in the guise of “preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.”
Set up new task forces – DoJ’s Weaponization Working Group, the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office Election Integrity Task Force and the D.C. U.S. Attorney General’s Special Unit: Election Accountability that can target voters, election officials, perceived political adversaries and journalists in search of alleged widespread voter fraud, which does not exist, and thereby enable election interference through investigations of perceived opponents, targeting of election officials for just doing their jobs and casting doubt on election systems.
Repeatedly threatened to prosecute election officials and to target nonprofit organizations involved in voter engagement, election monitoring and litigation to protect access to voting.
Rewarded election deniers with key appointments in the administration, including positions with oversight of election security. An election denier involved in efforts to challenge the 2020 election, Heather Honey, was appointed to the newly created role of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, and the CISA Director of Public Affairs is Marci McCarthy, a former Georgia GOP Party official who questioned the integrity of the 2020 election and claimed that January 6th was “set up and orchestrated by the FBI.” Trump installed election denier Harmeet Dhillon as chief of the Civil Rights Division, for decades DoJ’s primary instrument for protecting voting rights. Dhillion has refocused the motion toward investigating election officials rather than protecting the rights of voters. Over the summer, Dhillon sent letters to election officials across the country, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they facilitate noncitizen voting. New Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin relied on flawed data to assert widespread noncitizen voter registrations.
ProPublica estimates that at least 75 people across several federal agencies who were involved in safeguarding the 2020 election have been reassigned, been fired or been forced to resign. In their place, around two dozen have been installed, ten of whom, including those identified above, worked actively to reverse the 2020 election outcome and the others were associates of the first group.
Sidelined key law firms, diminishing the resources available to voters whose voting rights have been abridged or denied and the voting rights groups championing their causes.
Ordered criminal investigations of those who have tried to hold him accountable.
Questioned free speech of those who criticize him or his policies.
Pressured social media platforms to do away with content moderation and thereby allow disinformation to flow far more freely, all in the guise of protecting free speech and countering the “censorship industrial complex” purportedly deployed against conservatives.
Bullied news outlets through a combination of lawsuits and Federal Communications Commission pressure.
Ordered DoJ to investigate ActBlue, targeted former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Chris Krebs in an Executive Order, and set the stage for the targeting of pro-democracy, voter registration and GoTV groups;
Severely hampered the Election Assistance Commission, which was established by Congress after the 2000 election to assist states in administering elections.
Dismantled the federal government’s capabilities to counter foreign and domestic interference, by gutting election security/disinformation units at CISA, Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Election security teams at CISA and assistance to local election officials have been cut back, increasing the risk of chaos and doubt about the security of voting systems and the ability to counter election-targeted disinformation. The CISA work force is down an estimated 1,000 staffers (approximately one-third).
While there have been no arrests of officeholders or candidates for office, the administration is investigating Sen. Adam Schiff and charged Rep. LaMonica McIver with assault. Just before the Democratic mayoral primary, ICE agents arrested Democratic candidate Brad Lander as he was escorting a migrant out of a New York City court. DoJ has pursued two criminal cases against each of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Created a force potentially answerable only to him – ICE. And while ICE ostensibly is tasked with immigration enforcement, who knows how they might otherwise be deployed.
For those watching from afar, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, Trump will not cancel the midterms – he has no basis for doing so and history tells us that authoritarian leaders tend to embrace elections, no matter how subverted to provide legitimacy.
Second, there is absolutely no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States (whether noncitizens, dead or fake voters, rigged vote count and so on).
Third, the administration of elections is a matter for the states not the federal government.
Fourth, what happens after Election Day up to January 3, 2027 (when the next Congress is seated) will be as critical as what happens up to and on Election Day.
And, finally, it is hard to imagine that efforts will not continue to be made at scale through the spread of disinformation to sow doubt among Americans as to the security of election systems.
Will Trump declare a national emergency as a basis for deploying active-duty military, National Guard units or federal law enforcement agents (such as ICE or Border Patrol) to polling places and as a pretext for seizing ballots and voting machines? DoJ has already said it will deploy 1,000 election monitors to polling places. Will we see an uptick in efforts to intimidate election administrators and election workers via federal agencies or local malign actors?
Just as there is a playbook for the threats, so too is there a playbook for countermeasures. At the state level, governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and election officials have been gearing up for the midterms. Networks of lawyers, media organizations, lawmakers, tech platforms, civil society networks, campaigns – all know they will have critical roles to play.
Ultimately, it will be up to the voters, and if there is a lesson from the recent Hungarian election, it is that there is no more effective an antidote to election interference than overwhelming voter turnout and overwhelming majorities.
Four federal agencies have been sued amid calls to release information about the secret framework that the Trump administration uses to conduct safety reviews of frontier AI models prior to release.
In a Wednesday press release announcing the lawsuit, a nonpartisan nonprofit called Protect Democracy alleged that “almost no details” have been released to the public or Congress. To everyone except a few vague “trusted partners,” it remains unclear what the government’s review process looks like, which companies are involved in constructing the framework, or what legal authority Trump officials have to conduct the reviews.
“Neither the identities of those entities nor the criteria by which they were selected have been made public,” Protect Democracy said.
President Trump yesterday demanded that the Federal Communications Commission punish or rebuke an NBC journalist for saying he has "mixed results" in his election endorsements. In the latest example of how Trump is using the FCC to harass reporters and news organizations that he dislikes, he said Meet the Press host Kristen Welker "will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment" for what he claimed was a "purposeful inaccuracy."
"Kristen Welker, the Unpopular 'Hostess' of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press, just stated that Donald Trump has 'mixed results' on his Endorsements of Candidates, when the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, stand at 100% for the U.S. Senate, and 98% for the U.S. House, recently and over the longterm. How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves? Results are attached. Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
A separate post from Trump yesterday said, "THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT. FCC TO THE RESCUE! President DJT." Trump also posted a rant on Friday about New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, calling her "an unattractive person both inside and out" who "should be forced to turn over any and all money that she’s made through her fake reporting on me." Trump referred to Haberman throughout his post as "Maggot Haberman."
Trade talks between the US and Canada broke down last week, leading to a wave of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs. US President Donald Trump also fell back on an old favorite to needle his opponents, signing an executive order on Thursday to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America."
The body of water, which straddles the US-Canada border, gave its name to the Canadian province rather than the other way around. Regardless, the US government now refers to this great lake as Lake America—or it will soon. Official US government maps have yet to be updated, but Google wasted no time adopting the new, Trumpian name.
Google began rolling out this change for US users on Saturday. The company posted a brief update on its Google Maps blog, noting that it follows the US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) for its maps, so the company implies it had no choice but to rename Lake Ontario in Google Maps, which is the most popular mapping platform in the US by a wide margin.
As is standard procedure for major NASA missions, the US space agency held a post-launch news conference on Sunday morning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to provide information about how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was faring during its initial maneuvers.
What was not standard, however, is what happened in the middle of the news conference. A little less than half an hour in, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at his mobile phone, and then stood up and walked away from the dais where he had been seated behind a table along with other NASA officials. He briefly left the room.
Isaacman returned about a minute later, phone in hand, apologizing for interrupting NASA's chief of science, Nicky Fox, as she was speaking about the mission. "The President of the United States of America would like to address and congratulate everyone on this mission," Isaacman said, returning to his seat.
During a visit to Johnson Space Center, President Trump on Friday signed an executive order to establish a new commission with the purpose of creating the first national space academy.
"It's clear that we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators, and everything else to do what we have to do," Trump said. "I will sign an executive order to begin the process of creating a new national academy. It's called the US Space Academy. That's a big deal."
The proposed United States Space Academy would fall under the jurisdiction of NASA, and according to US space officials, is not intended be a traditional service academy in the sense that it educates and trains officers for the armed services, such as the Air Force Academy.
Donald Trump may be preparing to announce sweeping new semiconductor tariffs at the absolute worst time, the tech industry fears.
On Thursday, Politico reported that a wide range of new semiconductor tariffs, which the tech industry expects will “doom” artificial intelligence innovation in the US, could be imposed in the coming “weeks or months.”
About eight people familiar with the Trump administration’s plans were granted anonymity to discuss how the tariffs might work. They suggested that the framework for tariffs may change as it becomes finalized, but one approach under consideration could “dramatically expand the number of tech products subject to the duties, hitting not just chips but potentially many of the goods made with them, such as gaming consoles or the servers that fill data centers.”
Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year.
In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn't afford to simply "absorb" the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because "our margins on Playdate are low." As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That's in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited "market conditions" and tariff "uncertainty" in raising the asking price of legacy hardware and some Switch 2 accessories last year.
President Trump is expected to nominate Heidi Overton, a top conservative policy aide, as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to multiple media reports.
Overton is currently the deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and has played a key role in shaping a variety of health policies during Trump's second term. At times, she has notably angered members of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which was created by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Overton has a medical degree from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and earned a doctoral degree in clinical investigation from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While at Johns Hopkins, she worked with Marty Makary, the previous FDA commissioner who was ousted by Trump amid a cacophony of controversies.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday released data on the vaccination rates of US kindergarteners in the 2025–2026 school year, revealing that rates have once again decreased from the previous school year.
Vaccination rates have been slipping since the 2019–2020 school year, when the US had obtained rates of around 95 percent, the threshold needed to keep outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases from spreading in communities. The latest data shows the US is moving further away from that target.
Nationally, only 92.4 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the 2025–2026 school year, down from 92.5 percent last year. Coverage with the DTaP vaccine, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (whooping cough), similarly fell from 92.1 percent to 92.0 percent.
As Americans cook their vegetables to at least 158°F to kill a diarrheal parasite that has sickened over 24,000 people and killed two this summer, one US Senator is turning up the heat on Health Secretary Robert F. Kenney Jr. over the government's "calamitous response" to the record outbreak.
In a letter sent Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the federal response to the Cyclospora outbreak "botched" and "marred by missteps." She pointedly questioned whether corruption and incompetence within the Trump administration and its clear ties to Taylor Farms—the mammoth produce distributer that sold Mexican-grown iceberg lettuce linked to the outbreak—played a role in the federal government's failures.
"[P]olitical contributions and direct White House lobbying from Taylor Farms... raise urgent questions about the role this influence-peddling may have played in loosening federal food safety oversight and hampering the federal government’s response to the outbreak," Warren wrote in the letter.
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