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Billionaire Elon Musk has already funneled at least $366 million into the midterms to try to make sure voters elect Republicans. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that Musk has put more than $276 million of that money into groups and political action committees just since July. More than $76 million has gone into his own super PAC, which is focused on seven Senate seats in battleground states, and more than thirty House races.
Schleifer notes that this is just the money that law requires must be disclosed; sources told Schleifer that in both this election and in 2024, Musk has made seven-figure donations to candidates through so-called “dark money” groups: ones that aren’t required to disclose their donors.
Adam Wren, Meredith Lee Hill, and Will Steakin of Politico report that Trump’s super PAC, “MAGA Inc.,” is coordinating with other super PACs to try to salvage the Republicans’ control of the Senate. The Republican Senate Leadership Fund has poured close to $100 million into Ohio alone to defeat former senator Sherrod Brown and is expecting to dump close to $200 million into Texas to defeat James Talarico. It’s also throwing money at Iowa to defeat Josh Turek, at Alaska to defeat Mary Peltola, at Michigan to defeat Abdul El-Sayed, and even at Kansas, to defeat Adam Hamilton.
Among other projects, Musk’s money is producing literature accusing Democrats of being radicals.
And yet the real radicalism in American politics today comes from those like Musk, those on the right who are consolidating the power of the government and the money of the American people into their own hands: Musk’s businesses depend on government contracts, after all, contracts a Democratic-run Congress would likely revisit.
That right-wing radicalism was on full display this morning, when agents from the Department of Homeland Security conducted a predawn raid on the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN). According to the Fox News Channel, which appears to have been read into the raid ahead of time, the Justice Department claimed that the search “stems from a criminal fraud investigation” over immigration paperwork filled out by her late father in the 1990s when Omar was a child.
Not only is it unlikely that evidence of a potential crime committed when the congresswoman was a child would be in her Washington, D.C., residence decades later, but also, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted: “To state what’s obvious to prosecutors here, we are within the period before an election where [the Department of Justice] doesn’t take overt steps in an investigation that might influence its outcome. Another hard norm out the window.” More to the point was the comment by Mark Jacob of Stop the Presses, who noted: “This search was conducted by the Homeland Security Department, where lying and harassment are routine.”
Indeed, this latest attack on Omar follows Trump’s social media post of last Thursday, when he urged “[t]he people of Minnesota” to “fight back!” against Minnesotans of Somali heritage. Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a MAGA Republican, promptly echoed Trump, referring to Somali-Americans as “enemy combatants” and complaining that Democrats were not “rounding them up [and] putting them in jail.”
This new attack on a Democratic representative is the second attempt of the administration to cow Democratic representatives. It has an ongoing case against New Jersey representative LaMonica McIver, whom it accuses of assaulting immigration agents in a skirmish outside of Delaney Hall detention center, in which no one was hurt. If McIver is convicted, she faces up to 17 years in prison. Both Omar and McIver are women of color. The attempt of the president to arrest and imprison his political opponents in the legislative branch is a direct assault on our democracy.
Indeed, the administration is trying to make their opponents live in fear. The latest target of their ire is Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump’s first-term chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson was working in the White House in the weeks when Trump was trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and she testified before Congress about Trump’s behavior during that time. Federal prosecutors are trying to get a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to indict her for perjury.
As the attack on Omar shows, in their attempt to grasp complete control of the country, Trump and his loyalists are working hard to divide the American people along the old culture war lines that worked in the past. But Americans are concerned primarily about the economy as the war on Iran drives prices upward, so Republicans are becoming more and more extreme in their actions and their ads.
As Morgan Trau of WEWS wrote in a piece reprinted by the Ohio Capital Journal, an ad paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund featuring a woman who accuses Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown of “pushing transgender surgeries on minors ‘like her,’” and who, in another ad, claims she had “surgery without my parents’ consent” as “a kid,” actually shows a woman from Texas who had gender-affirming surgery in that state as an adult. She has no connection to Ohio, where such surgery on minors is illegal.
Brown’s statement on healthcare was that he believes families and their doctors, not politicians, should make healthcare decisions.
An even more extreme meltdown took place over the weekend as MAGA tried to insist that Texas Democratic candidate James Talarico had suffered a mental breakdown and had been admitted to a treatment facility in Ohio. As Will Sommer and Andrew Egger of The Bulwark explained yesterday, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher claimed they had proof that Talarico had been at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio. They claimed they had a tape of a Lindner employee telling them over the phone that Talarico had just been released.
With Musk pushing it, Sortor’s social media post alleging that “proof” garnered millions of views in hours.
But, predictably, the story fell apart fast. Neither the logic (why would Talarico go to Ohio for medical treatment rather than stay in Texas?) nor the timeline (Tararico was out in public in Texas during the time Sortor suggested he was in treatment) made sense. Then Sommer and Egger got access to the full recording of the alleged “proof.” It showed Amacher lying to the Lindner employee to get her to expose private health information. It also showed her repeatedly denying that anyone named James Talarico was in the system.
On Sunday night, the Lindner Center publicly announced that Talarico had never been treated there. Talarico himself posted a laughing emoji beside the information that he has never even been to Ohio. To a reporter, he added his own assessment of his opponent’s health, “I’ve heard credible reports that Ken Paxton has a serious medical condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice,” and noted that Paxton has refused to debate Talarico about actual issues.
Sommer and Egger note that while HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, says medical providers can’t disclose patients’ information, it also penalizes individuals who try to get that information improperly, imposing heavier penalties for those who commit that offense “under false pretenses.” Those who access that information “for commercial advantage, personal gain, or malicious harm” can be fined up to $250,000 and be imprisoned for up to ten years.
Amacher later told Jesse Singal that he did not do “any after-the-fact fact-checking work and pointed to the fact that he’s a political advocate, not a journalist, and is therefore held to different standards.”
Trump’s choice of Katie Zacharia on Friday to become the new White House press secretary illustrates that the administration is fully committed to pushing its dominance through disinformation. As Judd Legum explained yesterday in Popular Information, Zacharia is a conspiracy theorist who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy, the lie popular in 2016 that leading Democrats and Hollywood figures were sexually trafficking children and engaging in cannibalism in an organization run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.
As Legum notes, Zacharia was relatively obscure before Trump tapped her. Her major qualification is that she posts a lot on Trump’s social media site and has worked as a senior communications advisor for the site.
On Saturday, Trump told a crowd in Clarksville, Tennessee: “There’s such love. Like, I mean, it’s amazing. When you stand up here, it’s just like—the love. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap me.” He claimed that, in fact, what he does say is “things of common sense” and called for renaming the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean either “‘Trump Ocean’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas.’”
Media figures are increasingly showing that Trump’s promises are false. Although Trump suggested after public outcry about $20 million in tax dollars going to his ads promoting himself that he would pay for them, the ads were apparently paid for with money Republicans in Congress allocated to the Department of Homeland Security. When asked on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday about a reimbursement for taxpayers, Department of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin answered: “Any time we can do a public service announcement and brag about America, I’m all about it.... I think 99% of the coverage from President Trump is negative…. I commend the opportunity of President Trump to give us the opportunity to brag about America.” “So, no reimbursement,” host Margaret Brennan concluded.
Last night, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon ordered the administration to immediately stop running the ads, which have been running on national media for two weeks, saying they likely “exceed the purposes authorized by Congress and violate restrictions on publicity and propaganda.” Kyle Cheney of Politico explained that the administration tried to avoid a ruling on the legality of the ad campaign by saying it was going to stop it after Sunday.
Scott Nover, Aaron Schaffer, and Aoife Walsh of the Washington Post reported that the administration ignored the order and continued to run the ads today.
The administration also appears to have ignored the law on Saturday, when it felled more than 400 trees on the East Potomac Golf Links course that Trump wants to turn into another of his projects.
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes had previously warned the administration not to make any irreversible changes to the landscape, but she did not forbid it from doing maintenance work. The administration maintains the Saturday cutting was routine maintenance. Reyes was furious, telling the administration’s lawyers she didn’t know how she could have made it any clearer that she was trying to stop it from doing precisely what it did. She warned that the government had lost all credibility with her. The administration’s lawyer said they still planned to cut several hundred more trees.
Trump’s announcement on Sunday that both Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” has also been exposed as a devastating lie. At the time, Ukraine said it had heard nothing about any such plan until it appeared on social media, and Russia promptly attacked Ukrainian power plants.
Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote today in The Atlantic that Trump’s dropping of sanctions against Russian oil looks like “an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit.”
Meanwhile, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have attacked Saudi Arabia’s main airport, killing at least 20 people, including a U.S. national. Oil prices are rising again, and Trump is said to be considering joining the Saudi fight against the Houthis.
On Friday evening, before the long weekend, the Pentagon quietly raised the number of U.S. service members killed in the Iran war from 18 to 21, and the number of wounded from 767 to 865, updating the numbers that had been on the Defense Casualty Analysis System website since August.
As John Ismay of the New York Times noted, when the Washington Post reported in September that the Pentagon was hiding the true numbers of those killed in the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “This is DISGUSTING and FAKE. A complete LIE.”
On Wednesday, Barak Ravid of Axios reported that the U.S. military is drawing up plans for another round of major combat operations in Iran.
Hegseth has named Elon Musk, who is pouring money into the midterms, to Project Meridian, a group charged with plotting out the future of the American military.
Identifying where the actual radicalism in American politics lies at this moment is important.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/us/politics/elon-musk-midterms.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/12/maga-inc-money-midterms-01116078
https://apnews.com/article/ilhan-omar-home-searched-8e18c2aea948bd90f4d7a4eb