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News for the public, not the powerful.
Trump Tells His Own Voters They’re Too Poor for Mar-a-Lago, and the Internet Explodes
For three straight days, Fox News and the MAGA chorus howled that Barack Obama was an elitist for joking that Trump’s White House renovations looked like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Then Trump walked onstage in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Tuesday and did the real thing. He was pitching his promise to hand every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep Congress next week. He told the crowd they could spend it at his private Florida club. Then he laughed at them. He said $5,000 might get you a hamburger and a small dessert, and maybe not even that. “It’s not a good place if you’re price conscious,” he said. He’d already tried the line in Georgia. Former DNC chair Jaime Harrison said it exposed Trump’s abusive relationship with his own voters. One critic boiled it down. Trump told his supporters they’re peasants who couldn’t afford a meal at his club. And by the way, Congress hasn’t approved a dime of that $5,000, and nobody in the administration can explain how it would ever get paid. Affordability is the top worry for voters heading into November 3. Trump just told working people exactly what he thinks of them. They’re a punchline.
Did Dr. Oz Team Up With Election Deniers to Scare Nursing Home Voters?
Eight Senate Democrats want an answer. Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Alex Padilla, Ron Wyden, Cory Booker and three colleagues wrote to Mehmet Oz, who runs Medicare and Medicaid, demanding he urgently rescind a July memo and restore the 2020 and 2024 guidance on helping nursing home residents vote. That guidance told staff how to help residents request a mail ballot, fill it out, or get a ride to the polls. The July memo threw it out and replaced it with a warning that staff could be prosecuted for coercion. Within weeks, Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network seized on that memo to claim left-wing groups were stealing votes inside care facilities. Mitchell said it right on Steve Bannon’s show. The senators want every communication between Oz’s agency, Mitchell’s group, and Project Civica, a New York election denial outfit. They also caught Oz in a contradiction. In September he wrote Warren that helping a resident vote isn’t the kind of conduct that triggers a fraud investigation. So why not restore the guidance? Oz’s agency wouldn’t answer. “This is as low as it gets,” Warren said. These are our parents and grandparents. Frightening their caregivers out of helping them vote isn’t election integrity. It’s voter suppression aimed at the most vulnerable Americans we have.
Is Trump Rigging the 2030 Census to Erase Millions of Americans?
While everyone’s watching the midterms, Trump’s Census Bureau is quietly rewriting the rules for 2030. For the first time in American history, it wants to strip questions on race and ethnicity off the census, questions that have been there since 1790. And it wants to exclude noncitizens who don’t hold a green card. That doesn’t just mean the undocumented. It means refugees, people granted asylum, and people with immigration applications pending. The Constitution says count every person living here every ten years, and divide congressional seats and federal dollars by that count. More than 300 federal programs run on census numbers, including Medicaid, SNAP, school funding and school lunches. The 2020 census already undercounted Latinos by almost 5%, triple the 2010 miss. With ICE raids terrorizing neighborhoods, a census built to heighten that fear could erase millions. Another rule would use tax records to decide where people live, missing students, snowbirds and anyone in nontraditional housing. Lourdes Rosado of LatinoJustice says every one of these changes looks aimed at shrinking the count. The public comment period closes November 2. Fewer people counted means fewer House seats and fewer dollars for states with big immigrant populations. This is how you rig representation for a decade without winning a single election.
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Ramaswamy Weaponizes His Opponent’s Childhood Abuse, and Ohio Voters Revolt
Vivek Ramaswamy spent more than $4 million on a single attack ad in the Ohio governor’s race. The ad stars Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar and warning Ohioans not to elect her. Here’s what it leaves out. Acton hasn’t spoken to her mother since the late 1970s. Her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her when she was 12 years old. He fled Ohio before trial. Her mother stood by him, and officials took her two children away. That’s the woman Ramaswamy put on television. Republican Governor Mike DeWine and former Governor John Kasich both told him to pull the ad. Trump told him to keep running it. Now a Suffolk University poll shows the ad backfired. Seven voters said it moved them from Ramaswamy to Acton. One went the other way. Acton leads 48 to 44. Ramaswamy’s unfavorable rating climbed from 52% in September to 54% now, while Acton’s held steady at 41%. Cook Political Report moved the race from toss-up to lean Democrat. Ohio voters looked at a man who’d use a survivor’s childhood against her and said no. Decency still counts, and that should terrify every politician who thinks cruelty wins.
Will Michigan Voters Reject Trump’s “Jihadist” Smear and Send the First Muslim to the Senate?
Trump stood in Port Huron, Michigan, this weekend and told the crowd that if Abdul El-Sayed wins, Democrats will invite hordes of jihadis to our shores and you won’t even be able to have a Christmas. He called El-Sayed, a Rhodes scholar and former state health director, a Muslim Brotherhood member. Then he brought out the father of Todd Beamer, who died fighting the Flight 93 hijackers, and said Michigan must stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol. It’s not just Trump. RFK Jr. told a rally that 500 million Arabs don’t produce science or win Nobel Prizes. They do, by the way. Senator John Kennedy said El-Sayed sleeps in a Bin Laden jersey. JD Vance said he keeps weird friends. Republican nominee Mike Rogers keeps tying him to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, both of which El-Sayed has condemned. Dawud Walid of CAIR Michigan says in 21 years he’s never heard such vitriol. A Michigan State poll found 31% of likely voters are much less likely to back a Muslim, yet El-Sayed leads Rogers 48 to 44. Obama, campaigning with him in Detroit, said he’s seen this movie before. “It’s not going to work on Abdul.” Republicans have bet the Senate on bigotry. Michigan gets to answer them.
Crazy Alert. Google’s Chatbot Can’t Say Who Won the 2020 Election
Here’s a question any fourth grader can answer. Who won in 2020? Ask Google’s AI chatbot and you won’t get a name. Users on Bluesky found out Wednesday that instead of saying Joe Biden, the bot tells you to go look up the official results at the Federal Election Commission and the National Archives. Then it tacks on a warning that AI can make mistakes. In one exchange it claimed it was still researching. The election was six years ago. No credible evidence of interference has ever been found. Mediaite joked that Google’s chatbot must be angling for a job in the Trump administration. Google wouldn’t comment. And this comes just weeks after the White House’s own America.gov chatbot, built partly on Google’s Gemini, stopped saying Biden won and started calling the answer forbidden political commentary. When the biggest search company on Earth won’t state a settled fact because somebody might get angry, that isn’t caution. That’s how authoritarians win, one cowardly silence at a time.
And that’s the way it is, Today is Wednesday, October 28, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
