Three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices were projected to be retained in Tuesday’s election, handing Democrats critical statewide wins in the Keystone State. The wins ensure that Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht — all Democrats — will serve for another 10 years on the bench. The court currently has a 5-2 Democratic majority. Only…
Spencer Ackerman As much as the Trumpists claim to disavow the War on Terror, they walk a path paved by the most powerful vice president in US history. The post His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies appeared first on The Nation.
Democrat Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, was projected by multiple news outlets to become New York City’s next mayor—an outcome that would have been unthinkable just a year ago. He defeated disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent after losing the Democratic nomination in June, and the GOP nominee, Curtis Sliwa, frequent New York candidate perhaps best known for his red beret and love of cats. As of publication, Mamdani led with 50% of the vote to Cuomo’s 41%, with 75% of the expected vote counted, according to the Associated Press. Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani, left, greets supporters on Oct. 16 in New York City. If the results hold, Mamdani’s victory would amount to a generational break from the city’s political establishment—and a humiliating defeat for Cuomo, the once-dominant governor who left office in disgrace and had been itching to claw his way back. What started as a sleepy reelection bid for incumbent Mayor Eric Adams evolved into a full-blown political reckoning, reshaping the city’s political map and derailing Cuomo’s attempted comeback tour. The path to this moment took a dramatic turn in late September, when Adams withdrew from the race amid plummeting approval ratings and ongoing scandals, including federal corruption probes. In late October, he endorsed Cuomo, hoping to persuade his small base of backers to support another scandal-plagued independent. Yet Mamdani’s insurgent campaign didn’t falter. His message was steadfastly focused on the city’s cost-of-living crisis, with him proposing policies like rent freezes, higher taxes on the wealthy, free buses, and city-owned grocery stores. And clearly, it has resonated with voters. Despite facing millions in super PAC attacks as well as a well-funded establishment candidate, he built a devoted coalition of progressive activists, younger voters, and working-class New Yorkers. Independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, shown in October. By early voting, the race had become a clear test of which Democratic vision New Yorkers preferred. Cuomo leaned on the old-guard playbook, promising stability and toughness, while Mamdani ran as an insurgent pushing for big, structural changes. Cuomo and his allies tried to frame Mamdani as untested and extreme, pointing to his pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. President Donald Trump and far-right billionaire Elon Musk also waded in, with both endorsing Cuomo on Monday. Earlier this year, Trump falsely branded Mamdani a “communist,” and threatened to withhold federal funding if Mamdani enacted policies the president disagreed with. “Remember, he needs the money from me, as President, in order to fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises,” Trump posted online in September. “He won’t be getting any of it.” Right-wing news outlets also waged a war against Mamdani. Fox News aired segments suggesting he should be deported, while the New York Post churned out near-daily front page warnings of radical rule in City Hall. (Both outlets are owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch.) Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of New York City, shown in November. But the attacks seemed to only harden Mamdani’s base. His campaign mobilized a grassroots operation. Volunteers hit subway stations, organizers livestreamed rallies, and voters lined up at early-voting sites across the city—a wave of energy that recalled the campaign that propelled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress seven years ago. Privately, Trump reportedly told allies he didn’t think Mamdani could be beaten, underestimating the candidate’s broad appeal. Even as Mamdani’s rallies drew massive crowds, much of the Democratic establishment was hesitant to embrace him. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries waited until late October to endorse him, while New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer never publicly supported his campaign. But that apparent caution strengthened Mamdani’s anti-establishment image, positioning him as the candidate of street-level energy and outsider momentum. For months leading up to June’s Democratic primary, Cuomo led nearly every poll, but Mamdani closed the gap and won the party’s nomination, thanks to a surge of younger voters and working-class New Yorkers fed up with the status quo. By August, polls of the general election showed him overtaking both Cuomo and Sliwa as the Democratic base consolidated around their candidate. Datawrapper Content Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani immigrated to New York at age 7, grew up in the city’s public schools, and has now become the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century. His election marks others firsts as well: He is the city’s first Muslim mayor and its first mayor of Indian heritage. Cuomo’s downfall reads like a political tragedy. Once a master of New York’s backroom machinery, he launched his campaign as the heavy favorite, armed with money, name recognition, and a long resume—but also a cloud of scandal. He resigned in 2021 after a report accused him of sexually harassing at least 11 women, which he denies. He has faced allegations of covering up nursing home deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. And as of May, he was under federal investigation for allegedly lying to Congress. For Democrats, the implications go far beyond City Hall. A Mamdani win suggests a leftward shift in America’s largest city—and a reminder that even after years of internal division, progressive energy isn’t going anywhere. “I will be the mayor for every New Yorker, whether you voted for me, for Gov. Cuomo, or felt too disillusioned by a long-broken political system to vote at all,” he said after winning the Democratic nomination in June. “I cannot promise that you will always agree with me, but I will never hide from you. If you are hurting, I will try to heal. If you feel misunderstood, I will strive to understand. Your concerns will always be mine, and I will put your hopes before my own.”
Trump and his two administrations have been consistently evasive about his health. Instead of releasing his medical records, Donald Trump has made excuses or only released summaries and notes from his doctors. Trump is the most evasive president since Ronald Reagan when it comes to not disclosing health issues. The Reagan assessment is retroactive because the American people did not find out the true scope of Reagan’s Alzheimer’s until long after he left office. During his second term, it has long been suspected that Reagan was in decline, and his administration hid it. Fast-forward forty years, and the American people are watching an unpopular president show signs of cognitive decline regularly. One week ago, Donald Trump bragged about taking another dementia test: They have Jasmine Crockett, a low IQ person. They have, uh, AOCs, low IQ. You give her an IQ test, have her pass like the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed, I took, those are very hard. Uh, they’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way, but their cognitive tests, uh, let AOC go against Trump. Okay, let Jasmine go against Trump. I don’t think, Jasmine, the first couple of questions are easy, a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe. You know, when you get up to about five or six, and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions. In the same conversation with reporters, Trump also bragged about having an MRI and bragged that it was perfect. Nobody asked why Trump had the MRI until one week later. Read and watch Karoline Leavitt’s answer below. Read more
On the first day of every month, Ethel Ingram goes to the grocery store with $171 in federally funded food stamps and a nearly impossible mission: Buy enough food for the next 30 days. She usually fails. A couple of weeks into most months, she’s forced to pursue another goal: visiting enough food banks to stock her refrigerator until the month ends and her account reloads. But this month, the government shutdown cut off food assistance to her and millions of others. Now Ingram’s options to feed herself are dwindling. Her account balance remains zero, and the food banks she relies on are more crowded than she has ever seen them. This is what happens when a record-long government shutdown affects millions of Americans who are already struggling with the high cost of food, housing, child care, and just about everything else. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has stopped issuing payments for the first time in its 61-year history, leaving a sudden gash in the social safety net. For the nearly 42 million SNAP beneficiaries, November 1 was the day that the government shutdown became intensely personal. “November’s going to be kind of rough,” Ingram, a 76-year-old resident of Sanford, Florida, told me. Last week, she visited a local church’s food drive, where she was able to get two pieces of meat she hopes will sustain her for the week. “I’ve got my other bills coming up. I’ve got my light bill; I’ve got my water bill; I’ve got car insurance. It’s going to be rough.” Stories of overwhelmed food banks and hunger-stricken families have pushed members of Congress to finally begin serious discussions about bringing the 35-day shutdown to an end. Combined with snarled air traffic (Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said today to expect “mass chaos” at airports if the government remains shut down next week), sudden closures of Head Start programs, and the risk of another missed paycheck for federal workers, the SNAP cuts could represent the most significant development yet in a shutdown that has at times felt invisible. As tens of millions of people begin to feel the impact of the largest anti-hunger program going dark, the government closure has begun to morph from a nuisance into an emergency. One in eight Americans relies on SNAP to help make ends meet, a population that includes a large portion of children and seniors as well as parents hovering near the poverty line despite working full-time. Many of the beneficiaries live in Republican districts and voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, which was dominated by cost-of-living issues. A year later, members of Congress are hearing emotional tales of mothers who are planning to skip meals so their children can eat, minimum-wage workers who are forced to rely on the kindness of strangers for sustenance, and families who are having to choose which bills to forgo in order to buy a little food. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said yesterday that he is “optimistic” a resolution might be at hand, hinting that the quiet negotiations taking place between Democrats and Republicans in recent days may be making progress. Congress is set to go on a weeklong recess next week, so the coming days will be crucial in determining whether there is enough momentum to strike a deal or whether millions of Americans will approach Thanksgiving facing government-inflicted austerity. Even food banks, which typically receive bountiful donations during the holidays, are confronting concerns that demand may outstrip supply if the shutdown does not end soon. Greg Higgerson, the chief development officer at Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, told me that several of the nonprofits his organization partners with—such as the church Ingram visited—have called in recent days with dire warnings. They are “concerned about their food supply and how quickly they feel like they’re going to go through it in the next week or two,” he said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a whole lot to tell them.” Despite serving some 300,000 meals each day, his organization is no match for the SNAP program’s reach, he said. For every meal provided by a food pantry, SNAP—which typically spends more than $8 billion a month on benefits—has the capacity to provide nine, according to Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks. During past government shutdowns, the program has continued to issue assistance. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, appeared to be following that precedent before abruptly changing course last month. A detailed plan for using contingency funds to cover SNAP was removed from the USDA website, which in October began featuring a series of partisan banner messages attacking “Radical Left Democrats” for the predicament. The most recent message on the taxpayer-funded website says “the well has run dry” for SNAP benefits and, without evidence, accuses Democrats of prioritizing “gender mutilation procedures” over hungry families. After a group of Democrat-led states and nonprofit organizations filed lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s decision to cut off SNAP benefits, two federal judges last week ruled that USDA must use contingency funds to keep the program going. The agency told the court yesterday that it would be able to fund only half of people’s normal benefits, and that the funds could take weeks or even months to arrive. USDA said it would not tap a separate emergency account that would have allowed the payment of full benefits this month. (That account, it said in court filings, is earmarked for children’s-nutrition programs and might not be backfilled by Congress should it be used for SNAP.) Trump, who has used the shutdown to punish his perceived political enemies and shield those he sees as allies, offered a partisan take when asked last week about the shutdown. “Largely, when you talk about SNAP, you’re talking about largely Democrats,” he told reporters on Friday. But Republican beneficiaries in rural parts of the country, where food insecurity and poverty affect millions of people, are being hit
Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) called former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died on Monday, a “patriotic American who loved his country.” “While we strongly disagreed on most policy issues, his patriotism was clear when he returned to the House Floor to commemorate the first anniversary of January 6th,” Pelosi said Tuesday on the social…
Ben Lorber How the right’s crisis over US support for Israel has provided the white nationalist with the opening he needs to be welcomed into the MAGA fold. The post Nick Fuentes Has Officially Breached the MAGA Gates appeared first on The Nation.
The Department of Justice filed a consolidated response on Monday night to former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James’ challenges to the wildly illegal and totally comical appointment of Lindsey Halligan, America’s favorite former real estate lawyer, as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Comey and James have challenged Halligan’s latest gig because she was shuffled into her U.S. attorney spot through the same sorts of ridiculous appointment contortions courts have already ruled were not valid. Not just one court: Looking at you, Alina Habba in New Jersey. Not just two courts: Looking at you, Sigal Chattah in Nevada But three courts and counting: Looking at you, Bill Essayli in the Middle District of California. But, a-ha! Attorney General Pam Bondi has a trick up her sleeve, which boils down to “Haha, suckers! You challenged Halligan’s appointment as an interim U.S. attorney? Well, check out this order I wrote on Halloween that says Halligan is also a ‘Special Attorney’!! Betcha didn’t think of that!” Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks in the briefing room of the White House as President Donald Trump looks on. Yes, the DOJ filed with the court an order to nobody, allegedly written by Bondi on Oct. 31, where she retroactively appointed Halligan to her new special attorney role, effective back on Sept. 22, and claims that this ratified Halligan’s appointment “as an attorney of the Department of Justice going forward.” And, since Bondi can always appoint a special attorney to do whatever she wants, then it was totally fine, cool, and good that Halligan indicted Comey and James, because she was magically doing it as a special attorney. Retroactively. Bondi’s rationale is that she has the power to appoint anyone she wants as a special attorney, in whatever role she wants. So, by making Halligan a special attorney retroactively, even if the court were to rule that Halligan was not legally in her role as interim U.S. attorney, then Bondi can appoint Halligan in a limited capacity, where she is handling only two cases—the prosecutions of both Comey and James. Also according to Bondi, she reviewed the grand jury proceedings in both cases and then exercised the authority vested in her by law to “ratify Ms. Halligan’s actions before the grand jury and her signature on the indictments returned by the grand jury in each case.” Psych! Didn’t see that coming, didja? Since Comey and James are both arguing that their indictments are invalid because they were signed by Halligan, Bondi has now magically also signed them. Retroactively. Law and Crime called this “one simple trick” to save the flailing prosecutions, but it’s really more “one weird trick,” the legal equivalent of skeevy ads you see at the bottom of tacky news sites offering a cure for toenail fungus that somehow involves a banana peel. Bondi also says that even if Halligan gets tossed, her terrific work in getting those indictments shouldn’t get thrown out, as that is not an “appropriate remedy for “what is at most a procedural misstep.” Now, if the DOJ had a shred of credibility, it would have to disclose that this is the same approach Bondi tried to save Alina Habba’s gig as acting attorney for the district of New Jersey, and we know that didn’t work out so well there. Related | Whoopsie, Alina Habba isn’t legal Also, Halligan’s appointment wasn’t a procedural misstep or some minor thing like a wrong date on a document. Halligan’s appointment was the result of the president of the United States demanding, via what he thought was a DM but was very much not, that Bondi install Halligan so she would prosecute his enemies. Then, Trump fired Eric Siebert, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Then, Bondi appointed Halligan via the same shady mechanism courts had already ruled against. Then Halligan secured indictments before the grand jury, somehow only a few days after getting appointed. That’s not a procedural misstep. One more thing, you rubes. Bondi says it’s no problem that Halligan signed those indictments solo, because even if she wasn’t the interim U.S. attorney, her role as a random DOJ attorney “can present a case to a grand jury or sign an indictment, and the Attorney General plainly possessed and exercised the authority to make Ms. Halligan a government attorney, as the Attorney General has now confirmed.” This is, of course, ridiculous. Bondi’s statement essentially means that any junior prosecutor anywhere in the DOJ and U.S. attorney offices is fully empowered to present anything they want to a grand jury and sign an indictment. If that were the case, a line-level prosecutor could head into a friendly Washington, D.C., grand jury and get them to indict Pam Bondi, and somehow the DOJ would then just throw up its hands and say “Welp, you got us! Anyone can bring charges!” Bondi bringing up her review of the grand jury proceedings may not have been the shrewdest move, given that one of Comey’s flurry of motions seeks to unseal the grand jury proceedings because of “Ms. Halligan’s likely motive to obtain an indictment to satisfy the President’s demands, the inaccuracies in the indictment, and the determination of every career prosecutor to consider the case that charges were not warranted.” As much as the Trump administration has scrambled to save Habba, Chattah, and Essayli, they’re going to throw far more effort at saving Halligan. She’s there specifically for Trump to exact revenge on Comey and James, and the DOJ is not going to let up. Related | Trump team faces critical shortage of morally flexible lawyers
The revelation that Donald Trump has demolished the East Wing, with plans to rebuild it at jumbo size with private funds, provoked an initial wave of outrage—followed by a predictable counter-wave of pseudo-sophisticated qualified defenses. “In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible,” editorializes The Washington Post. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board have similar assessments: We should all calm down, put aside our feelings about the president and the admittedly flawed process by which he arrived at this project, and appreciate the practical value of the new facility. Let’s forget questions of proportion and aesthetics (I could not be less qualified to judge either) and consider the matter solely on the issue of corruption. Trump has funded the project by soliciting donors who have potential or actual business before the government. By traditional standards, this would constitute a massive scandal. We know this because a very similar scandal occurred about a decade ago. Remember the Clinton Foundation? After the 43rd president left office, he established a charitable foundation to undertake good works: disaster relief, public health, and other largely uncontroversial endeavors. But the Clinton Foundation became a political liability after reports suggested that it created a potential conflict of interest. Bill Clinton may have retired from elected office, but Hillary Clinton harbored widely known ambitions to run in the future. So the wealthy people and companies that donated to the foundation might have been hoping for access to and gratitude from a potential future president. [Conor Friedersdorf: Donald Trump thinks America needs a better ballroom] Conservatives were not alone in denouncing this arrangement. In August 2016, the Post editorialized that “some donors to the Clinton Foundation may have seen their gifts as means to buy access—and it points to much bigger potential problems. Should Ms. Clinton win in November, she will bring to the Oval Office a web of connections and potential conflicts of interest, developed over decades in private, public and, in the case of her family’s philanthropic work, quasi-public activities.” Similar criticism appeared from the likes of NPR (“I think it contributes to all of the concern about her honesty and trustworthiness,” observed the now-late Cokie Roberts), the Times’ editorial board, me, and others. Like pretty much any other pre-Trump complaint, all of this sounds quaint today. But the actual facts of the case are at least as damning. The solicitations for the $300 million ballroom (as of press time—the cost keeps rising) are being made not by a candidate but by a sitting president. The money is going not to charity but to a public project that will, in part, underwrite Trump’s luxurious lifestyle. (Imagine if the Clinton Foundation had been building gold-embossed ballrooms for Bill and Hillary to entertain guests in!) While the Clinton Foundation disclosed all its donors, Trump has kept many of his ballroom donors secret. The greatest difference is that Trump’s moves to benefit his friends and hurt his enemies are out in the open, which makes the quid pro quo element far cruder. If donating to a Clinton charity was like buying your date a nice dinner in the hopes of getting lucky, donating to a Trump charity is more like bringing a fistful of cash to a brothel. The Clintons’ conflict of interest drove waves of skeptical coverage and hostile commentary. This concern has yielded barely a footnote in the Trump-ballroom story. The Post brushes off the problem in a clause (“Though the fundraising for the ballroom creates problematic conflicts of interest, two examples validate Trump’s aggressive approach”), later noting, almost in passing, that the donors include the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Douthat and the Journal’s editorial page likewise dispense with the conflict issue in a sentence. It may well be true that concerns about the corrupting effect of these donations are just too slight against the backdrop of a presidency that has obliterated the wall between public policy and personal gain. I will concede that the East Wing demolition is not the worst thing Trump has done. It may not even rank among the top 1,000 worst things he’s done. [David A. Graham: It’s already different] But the fact that one of the biggest scandals of the Clintons’ careers hardly warrants a harrumph now shows how low the standards of behavior have fallen in Trump’s Washington. I sympathize with the mainstream media’s inability to properly capture the breadth of Trump’s misconduct. The dilemma is that holding Trump to the standards of a normal politician is impossible. The Times would have to run half a dozen banner-style Watergate-style headlines every day, and the news networks would have to break into regular programming with breathless updates every minute or so. Maxing out the scale of outrage has the paradoxical benefit of allowing Trump to enjoy more generous standards than any other politician has. Still, although holding Trump accountable to normal expectations of political decorum may be impossible, surely we don’t need to praise him for merely committing normal-size scandals. The people losing perspective here are not the ballroom’s critics, but its defenders.
Doing anything that tries to stop people from voting is undemocratic. On election day in 2024, bomb threats were made against polling places in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. NPR reported in 2024: U.S. intelligence officials said the threats appeared to originate from Russian email domains, though it was not clear whether the threats originated with Russia. Intelligence officials had previously said they were “observing foreign adversaries, particularly Russia, conducting additional influence operations intended to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans.” Bomb threats are one way to destabilize democracy and make people fearful of showing up to vote. PoliticusUSA’s news and opinions are 100% independent. Support us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now They have also become more prevalent in Donald Trump’s America, when Putin knows that he has total freedom to meddle in US elections, because Trump has gutted American defenses against foreign election interference, so the door is wide open. The difference is that the states are stepping up to fill the void and keep America’s elections safe and secure. With high-profile elections in New York City, New Jersey, Virginia, and California, it is not surprising that those who wish to undermine US democracy, adversaries both potentially foreign and domestic, are up to their now old tricks in 2025. Just like in 2024, bomb threats were emailed to polling places. This time, the target was northern New Jersey, but the state was ready for the threats. Story continues below. Read more
