Essays

On November 3, Missourians will answer five statewide questions. Four are constitutional amendments referred by the legislature; one is a referendum the people forced onto the ballot themselves. Two of them are about the machinery of voting rather than about any policy a vote would produce, and that is the quiet feature of this ballot. Before the state decides who governs, it is being asked to decide how much of the deciding the people get to keep. ...

Question: Twenty-three days from Election Day the professionals moved in one direction without exception, and the money moved the other way, so which of them should a reader believe? Answer: Both, because they are answering different questions. Ten rating changes landed this week across five forecasters, and every one of them moved toward the Democrats.1234 Cook Political Report revised its estimate of Democratic pickups upward to two to six seats and called Kansas “Democrats’ Cinderella story of the cycle.”15 Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved Alaska out of its toss-up column and then wrote the sentence that will be quoted until November: “For the first time all cycle, Republicans now need to win more of our Toss-ups to hold the Senate than Democrats need to win in order to flip it.”2 ...

On July 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14319, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” The order requires that any large language model procured by a federal agency adhere to two “Unbiased AI Principles”: truth-seeking and ideological neutrality (The White House, 2025a). Speaking at the signing, the president said: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries” (NPR, 2025). ...

Question: When the government asks two courts to decide a case on the record it has chosen, what happens if both courts answer that the record is not finished? Answer: They order more. On October 9, Judge Christopher Cooper refused to close discovery in the Kennedy Center case, extended it two weeks to October 23, and directed the Board to produce three things it had resisted: the FY 2026 financial statements, the text messages, and any non-privileged document showing that the Chairman’s February 1 announcement affected the votes the Board cast in August and September. The same day, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to produce the underlying handwritten FBI interview notes it had declined to furnish in redacted form, by noon on October 16. Two days earlier, Cooper ordered the unsealing of the 163-page JLL Plan on which the Board relies to justify the closure. And in the third docket, the D.C. Circuit, where the government wants both questions settled for good, let its October 9 dispositive-motions deadline pass with nothing filed and its stay motion still undecided eleven days after the last brief landed. ...

I have written about grift before. The grift is the con at scale, the confidence game run from the highest office in the land, open and defended as virtue. This essay is about the machinery that makes the grift possible: a presidency that no longer argues with reality but generates its own. PolitiFact counted 36 posts on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account since his inauguration that used AI-generated imagery. Twenty-one of them promoted or sensationalized Trump and his administration. Twelve degraded his opponents. Three reinforced his policy messaging (PolitiFact, 2025). NBC News, reviewing the same feed, found “dozens” of pieces of synthetic media, roughly half of them posted in August and September 2025 alone (NBC News, 2025). The White House’s own X account has posted at least 14 more since January. Add the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and other agency accounts, and the count grows further. ...

I have written about corruption at the summit before. Corruption at the Summit argued the constitutional case: that when public power serves private gain, the republic corrodes. The Corruption Tax argued the economic case: that graft misallocates capital, raises the cost of borrowing, and falls hardest on those with no access. Both essays used the word corruption, and both treated it as a moral and institutional failing. This essay is about something different, or something worse. It is about grift. ...

Question: What percentage of the contracts the current administration has entered has finished on time and under budget, and how does that percentage compare with the previous administration? Answer: Nobody publishes that number, and no system exists that could produce it on request. The federal government tracks whether contracts exist, what they cost, and who holds them. It does not publish whether they finished on time, and it does not publish whether they finished under budget. The system that does record those facts is not public, is frequently late, and is the only place they live. ...

I have an apology to make. I have been making them, in fact, for twenty months, and I have finally read the whole stack, and I want to confess what is in it. I am the man who explains. I am the friend at the dinner table who says, “Yes, but consider the context.” I am the citizen who, watching the tape, reaches for the word rhetoric the way other people reach for a chair. I have made room for this administration in more conversations than I can count, and always in the same spirit: not to defend the indefensible, but to keep a conversation going with people I love. That is the first thing to confess. The second is that I have stopped, and I want to show you why, because the record closed the case for me one apology at a time. ...

Question: Thirty days from Election Day, after Inside Elections moved seven states in a single October 1 update, the Senate Leadership Fund pulled its money out of North Carolina to defend Kansas, the New York Times found Kansas tied at 45 percent, and Kalshi’s own desk put Democratic Senate control at 63 percent, is the question still whether the Democrats can win the majority, or has it become how many ways they can still lose it? ...

Question: What does a disclosure statute mean if the government can ask a court to decide the case before any record of its compliance exists? Answer: This week it asked two courts to do exactly that, and it asked the second one not to look at all. On October 1 the Justice Department moved for judgment on the pleadings in Phang v. Blanche, the Epstein files case before Judge Emmet Sullivan, and in a companion motion asked the court to postpone the certified list of the administrative record that was due that same day. Two days earlier, in the consolidated appeal of the same case, it told the D.C. Circuit that the Epstein Files Transparency Act’s scheme “precludes judicial review” of Phang’s claims. In the third docket, the Kennedy Center case, Representative Beatty told Judge Christopher Cooper that the record the government did produce was assembled to defeat review, and she used the phrase the court itself had used in May: “a stacked deck of discovery”. ...