Three for the road
Nero fiddled. Trump partied.
The Mar-a-Lago bash was billed as a Halloween Great Gatsby party with the host serving up a lavish spread, complete with female dancers wearing laced flapper dresses and feather headbands.
The Jazz Age-themed party — coming on the eve of the federal government’s cut off of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program grants to 42 million Americans — conjured up a different image to many.
Money does make the world go ‘round after all.
Oops, I forget!
Despite all the efforts by the Trump regime to manage their message, sometimes they can overlook the simplest thing.
The Boston Globe Spotlight Team highlighted Drug Enforcement Administration raids in New England, including the small town of Franklin, New Hampshire, that netted 171 people, including some they claimed to be high-ranking members of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. The New England special agent in charge boasted:
“We’re the DEA. We’re not going after low-level retail drug traffickers.”
One father disagreed:
“I can guarantee that he’s not part of the Sinaloa Cartel,” Scott Alati said of his son, Tyler, who was charged in state court in Franklin with a felony-level drug sale and immediately released without having to post bail. “He isn’t a high-ranking member of anything. He’s high-ranking dumb.”
The agent making that carefully deconstructed claim: Jason Forget.
You bet he did.
Turn your calendar ahead one year
It’s customary for news organizations to offer polls on the weekend before elections to highlight key races. The four that stand out this cycle are for New York City mayor, governors in New Jersey and Virginia and a Democratic-backed California ballot question that would enable a mid-decade redistricting.
But ABC News and the Washington Post apparently got confused on the weekend time change and sought to look ahead to the 2026 midterms. And here’s what the once-proud Post chose to share with readers about an election one year out:
Voters divided on midterms despite broad Trump disapproval, poll finds
To be fair, the lede declared: “Americans broadly disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling his job, and a majority say he has gone too far in exercising the powers of his office.”
The story then proceeds to inform readers that voters aren’t too happy with Democrats either. Something that ought to be clearly obvious to anyone who pays attention, which admittedly includes a decreasing number of Americans.
But as any good political journalist should know, polls are simply a snapshot in time. And at the rate Trump is taking the nation down an authoritarian path, there’s reason to wonder if there will even be free and fair elections a year from now.
Let’s check back on that prediction down the road. Maybe even after Tuesday, which what less navel-gazing polls suggest will be four wins for Democrats.