Politics

I have an apology to make, and I want to make it properly this time. I doubted the children’s investment accounts. I said they were a gimmick. I said the whole thing was a branding exercise with a stock chart attached. I was wrong, and I want to say so before anyone else does. Because the facts, as the administration has stated them, are remarkable. Nearly seventy million Trump Accounts have been created, more than sixty million of them by automatic enrollment, and every American child under eighteen with a valid Social Security number now has one. I apologize for the cynicism. It turns out you really can give every child in the country a financial stake in the future in a single quarter. ...

Question: Nine days before Election Day, Republicans are spending $26 million to defend Kansas, suing to block certification in Alaska and retreating from North Carolina, so why is control of the Senate still a coin flip? Answer: Because every one of those facts describes a party playing defense, and defense is not the same thing as defeat. Cook Political Report moved three Senate ratings on October 20: South Carolina from likely to lean Republican, Mississippi from solid to likely Republican, and Minnesota from likely to lean Democratic. Silver Bulletin moved Iowa from toss-up to lean Democratic a day later.1 That is four moves in seven days, three toward the Democrats, and together they describe a map that has widened rather than a majority that has settled. Kalshi put Democratic control at 68 percent on October 23, up from 62 percent on October 15 and from less than 43 percent on June 24.2 The market is not hesitating about direction. It is hesitating about the last mile, which runs through five states that the forecasters describe in five different ways, and nine days is enough time for the last mile to move either way. ...

Satire. Every figure below is drawn from the proposed rule and the responses to it; the notice itself is imagined. Office of International Student Services Notice of Program Fee Dear Student, On October 8 the Department of Homeland Security published a proposed rule under Docket No. ICEB-2026-0100. The schedule of fees below takes effect sixty days after a final rule publishes. Please review it before your advising appointment. Item 1. Initial Optional Practical Training recommendation — $70,000. ...

Question: Sixteen days before Election Day, Democratic Senate candidates raised four times what Republicans raised, nine of the week’s eleven rating changes moved their way, and the president’s approval fell to a record low, so why does control of the Senate still come down to five states that could go either way? Answer: Because a lead is not a majority, and this week made the difference between them visible. The third-quarter filings, due October 15, showed Democratic candidates raising $253 million to the Republicans’ $56 million across the fifteen races NBC News rates as competitive, and winning the money race in fourteen of them.1 Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved five Senate ratings, four of them toward the Democrats, and its tally now stands at 49 seats at least leaning Democratic, 46 at least leaning Republican, and five toss-ups: Kansas, Iowa, Maine, Ohio and Texas.2 That arithmetic is the week’s most important number. A week ago Republicans needed three of four toss-ups to hold a 50-50 chamber with the vice president’s tiebreaker, and Democrats needed two of four. This week Republicans need four of five, and Democrats still need two.2 The path got cheaper for one party and narrower for the other in the same seven days. ...

Whether the second Trump administration has damaged American self-government is no longer a matter of opinion. It is a matter of measurement, and the people who measure it have reported. The open questions are narrower and harder: how much of the damage is structural, how much is reversible, and what a citizen who wants to oppose it can do on an ordinary Tuesday. This essay takes up the record first, because the argument rests on it, and then the work, because a record is not a plan. ...

I owe you a plain statement of what I mean by failure, because the word does a great deal of work and I do not want it to do more than I intend. A state is a human instrument. It is not a nation, not a culture, not a church, and not the sum of a people. It is a machine that is built, in the words of the American preamble that I have spent years defending, to secure the blessings of liberty for those who live inside it. Judged by that purpose, a state succeeds when the people subject to it can imagine a better life for their children than the one they inherited, and it fails when they cannot. This essay is an argument that the Russian state, as it is presently constituted, has failed at that task by almost every measure that matters. It is also an argument, and I want to be unambiguous about this, that the failure belongs to the state and the system, not to the Russian people, who are its victims and not its authors. ...

The midterms come Tuesday, November 3, and the single most consequential fact about them is not a candidate, a poll, or a map. It is that most eligible Americans will not vote. In 2022, the closest thing the country has seen to a high-turnout midterm in generations, 52.2 percent of the citizen voting-age population cast a ballot.1 By the stricter measure that counts only the voting-eligible population, turnout was 46 percent.2 Either way, the majority stayed home. In 2014 the number was worse: 41.9 percent by the census count, and just 36.4 percent of eligible voters by the elections-project measure, the lowest since 1942, a year when a large share of the country’s eligible voters were overseas fighting a world war.13 The largest bloc in American politics is not a party and not a movement. It is the empty seat. ...

The Republican Party has been called many things this year, and almost none of them by its own members. A cult of personality. A revenge machine. A rubber stamp. A party that lost its way. The metaphors are all attempts to describe the same spectacle: a governing majority that has become, in practice, a single man’s instrument, and that defends the arrangement with the vocabulary of loyalty rather than the vocabulary of policy. ...

On September 20, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a twenty-million-dollar contract to a firm called LMD Agency, Inc. for what the contract describes as a “national media campaign.” The money did not begin at Homeland Security. The White House Office of Management and Budget transferred it to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which drew it from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the record names the purpose in full: “OBBBA commemorative events.” ...

On the afternoon of October 9, 2026, a gallon of diesel in the United States cost $6.28, down from a record $6.53 set on September 22 but still up roughly 70 percent since the United States and Israel went to war with Iran in February (ABC News Australia, 2026). President Donald Trump placed a call to President Vladimir Putin, ostensibly to discuss a suspected outbreak of plague in Russia. What he announced instead was a deal: Russia would send more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel to “the American and Global Marketplace” at once, another 500,000 tons in November, one million tons “immediately thereafter,” and then, if its refineries allowed it, three million more. Diesel prices, the president wrote on Truth Social, “will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!” (The Business Standard, 2026). ...