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Trump is trying to get his construction projects done before Democrats can stop him when they take control of Congress in two months after last night’s spectacular victories. There’s an urgent reason for that, from his perspective.

Monday afternoon, on the eve of the midterm election, Trump stood at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and delivered his closing argument.

But instead of talking about healthcare, inflation, housing costs, education, or the challenges working families and farmers are facing as the result of his and the GOP’s policies, he went off on an extended, rambling rant about fountains, marble, the “arch,” and his other construction projects. And, repeatedly, about Corinthian columns.

As Barack Obama noted last week, Trump has an obsession with gluing gold-painted decorations to the walls of the Oval Office; Obama called it “arts and crafts.” He’s covering things with gold trim, gold gilded picture frames, elaborate ornamentation, and even regilding monumental statues in DC. He’s torn down the White House’s East Wing, is building a massive ballroom, is ripping up an historic DC golf course, and wants a triumphal arch.

What’s going on here?

Just ridiculing this as “arts and crafts” misses an enormously important aspect of what Trump’s up to; this isn’t simply the vanity of a former real estate developer who likes shiny stuff.

Historians will tell you that there’s a long and disturbing history of brutal authoritarian leaders, particularly fascists, being obsessed with architecture, massive construction projects, and remaking capital cities in their own images.

And now Trump’s doing it to America and few people seem to realize its importance.

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[Houston, TX] US Special Agent Nicolas Little’s job is to protect America’s foreign embassies from terrorist attacks. He sports a heavy bulletproof vest, a lawman’s badge and a gun he carries everywhere. Everywhere but a voting booth.

Little told me he never imagined that the President of the United States could order his fellow federal agents into Texas polling stations on Election Day Tuesday.

Little will have none of it. In his capacity as the Chairman of the Justice Committee of the Houston NAACP, he has filed suit in federal court to block this unprecedented invasion of armed agents into the election process. The invasion was ordered by Donald Trump’s Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Blanche announced the Department of Justice will send 1,000 extra monitors — including agents from the Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to Tuesday’ midterms, though he claimed reports that they will be armed are “completely false.”

Though federal agents generally carry guns, it has been illegal since the civil war to station armed agents at polls, unless they are investigating or preventing federal crime.

Unfortunately, that is exactly the claim of the Justice Department, that they are on the hunt for voters and poll workers committing the federal crime of allowing aliens and other illegal voters to cast ballots.

Little, who was in court for the NAACP by zoom on Monday, heard the Department of Justice no-guns promise — and the caveats. Guns or no guns, Little told me, “the fact that these ‘monitors’ will not be armed still creates an atmosphere of intimidation especially given the recent events in our communities involving federal officers.”

In San Antonio, we spoke with Lydia Camarillo, President of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), a group known for its non-partisan Latino Mobilization. She is concerned about the fear factor in this down-to-the-wire Senate race. The word is getting around that the massing of one thousand federal agents. That, by itself will scare away voters whether the feds brandish their weapons or not.

To Little, this show of federal force looks a lot like intimidation of the voters and smells a bit too much like Jim Crow and José Crow.

“I’m pretty sure that these poll monitors that would be deputized, they’re not going to be pulling aside Anglo-Saxon or white people or people of European descent. It’s definitely going to be Black and Brown people.”

He’s afraid they’ll be sending hostile, untrained, guys looking for a fight.

“Let’s look at who they’re sending. FBI, ICE agents. These are people under Homeland Security that, in the past two years, have terrorized people, particularly minority communities.”

Blanche and Trump have made it clear their targets are the thousands — they claim hundreds of thousands — of Mexican aliens that they claim Democratic counties are allowing, if not encouraging, to register and vote illegally.

As Trump told a Dallas crowd this year, “If the radical left Democrats and communists win this election…they’re going to defund the police, giving voting rights and welfare to 25 million illegal aliens.”

The US Attorney for Southern Texas Aaron Reitz says he’s energetically following Blanch’s order regarding help to alien voters: “If you violate federal election law, I will hunt you down and prosecute you.”

Agent Little, who served in the military for 10 years, including in Afghanistan, is stunned that his government would invade Texas.

“These type of tactics are things that I’ve seen when I was in a combat zone where people with scarves and their faces covered, kidnapping people. What is this, Russia?”

On Friday, I joined Little at an early voting station in downtown Houston. Cars packed the lot and the line for voters stretched down the sidewalk. Houston is Democratic Blue territory and the big, noisy turnout felt more like a block party than a civic exercise.

Crossing the Orange Line

Little pointed out an orange line spray-painted in the parking lot by poll workers, marking 100 feet from the poll’s doors. Even a federal agent like Little cannot and will not go over that line into the polling station.

What if the feds crossed the line, literally? Little’s answer is by the book. “That would be a problem, because that would be a direct violation of the law.

The law does not allow deputized, armed agents to enter a polling location. They violated the law as soon as they step across that line with any intent to go in after anyone.”

Little reminds us that, in the 1960s after passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department did send monitors to Texas to protect non-white voters.

“What’s different about Trump that’s different from Lyndon Johnson sending in monitors; there’s a difference between sending in monitors to protect people’s right to vote versus sending in monitors to antagonize people’s right to vote.”

Houston, with the largest Black population of any city in America plus a huge Hispanic citizenry, is US Senate candidate James Talarico’s ticket to victory.

Tamaro Bell, a Black commentator on the local Fox channel, has no doubt that the government’s announcement of a posse of deputized federal agents will scare away Hispanic voters.

The state’s GOP legislature has already imposed an obstacle course of State laws which have suppressed the Houston vote.

Bell, who was holding court at the poll party, is furious over the obstacle course of voting impediments unique to Texas. “They’re doing their best to obliterate voting rights.”

Texas blocks most online registrations and prohibits voter drives unless conducted by special deputized registrars. And no one under 55 can get a mail-in ballot without a paid airplane ticket or other documented proof of travel. The list goes on.

“Not the Pinko Commies”

We drove a hundred miles north out of Houston to Paxton country. In the small town of Sealy, deep in rural Red Texas at the early polling station, we clocked only a single lonely voter, outnumbered by curious cows, skinny ones (“hamburger on the hoof”) that sidled up to our camera.

Outside the Saddleback Saloon on Main Street, Bradley Spaulding, who sells gun silencers, said he had no problem with Trump sending weapon-wielding agents into the polls. “

If you’re not doing anything illegal…I’m not afraid of my law enforcement agencies of any sort. I mean, this is Texas. We all have guns.”

Like other Republicans we spoke with, Spaulding, is voting for Paxton, but without much enthusiasm. “I’m going to hold my nose and vote for not the pinko Commies.”

Thrown out in her nightgown

In San Antonio, I spoke with Lydia Camarillo, President of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), a group known for its non-partisan Latino Mobilization. She is concerned about the fear factor in this down-to-the-wire Senate race.

She said that one friend of hers, Lidia Martinez, an 87-year old who helps register other elderly voters, was rousted out of her home at 6am by the Texas Election Integrity police acting at the direction of Texas’ chief law enforcement officer, Ken Paxton.

Paxton’s men overturned her home, seizing her phone, her computer and private papers while locking her outdoors in her nightgown.

No aliens were found in her home, nor evidence she had registered any.

Nevertheless, Paxton crowed on TV about his bust of Martinez and other volunteer voter helpers whom he accused of registering non-citizens.

Paxton’s office did not respond to our request for an explanation nor his evidence to justify the home invasion. Camarillo spoke for Martinez who could not comment directly because of ongoing litigation.

Ultimately, the courts threw out the cases against all those Paxton accused. And, no small fact, in the past four-year election cycle, not one single alien was convicted of voting in a Texas election.

Remember the Massacre

In Texas, football, history and elections are contact sports.

To promote a revisionist White Liberator version of history, the State Legislature has laundered Texas schoolbooks, says Manuel Garza, SVREP’s Field Director.

“They always tell us to ‘Remember the Alamo!”

Garza, whose office is down from the Alamo tourist attraction, said, “But they want us to forget La Matanza.” La Matanza is The Massacre.

He explained that, between 1910 and 1920, three thousand Mexican ethnics and indigenous people like himself were gunned down, lynched or burned alive by Texas Rangers, vigilantes and the US Calvary.

For a frightening comparison, that’s roughly the same number of Black people lynched by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Massacre and history of “No Mexicans” signs left generational scars, amplifying the power of voter intimidation tactics.

Race relations in Texas remain raw and memories still sting. Back at the Saddleback Saloon, the wall carried a faded warning, “Members only” partly covered up by old bottles. It was covered because, I was told, the message continued, ‘NO N—-RS.’

Retaliation and 2028

To some extent, Camarillo sees this Senate race as a dry run for the 2028 Presidential race, a test kitchen for new vote suppression techniques aimed at the growing Hispanic, Black and Asian-American Texas electorate.

“If in fact Latinos turn out at the levels that we think they’re going to turn out, then what we’re also going to see is that Texas is a competitive state for 40 electoral votes in 2028.”

One battle brewing over the horizon: The state has put over 1.4 million Texans on a “suspension” list, concentrating on the single county of Travis, home of the solid-Democratic city of Austin.

The “suspended” citizens may vote in this week’s contest but thousands will lose their vote in 2028.

Camarillo says SVREP’s donors have been warned away from her group, and the arrest of fellow registration volunteers sends a dark signal, “An attempt to block Latinos from voting and to scare us and to give us the fear.

But I’m going to use Lidia Martinez’s words, ‘They try to scare us, but I’m not scared at all. I’m showing up and continue to take people to vote.’”

DOGE and retaliation

In Houston, Agent Little acknowledged that other agents were unlikely to join his legal protest on which the courts have yet to rule.

“A lot of us just survived DOGE, so some people are still a little traumatized. People are literally being fired for being called whistleblowers.”

Little’s stand did, in the end, have a major impact. Even if the lawsuit did not block the agents, the Trump Administration told the NAACP and court on Monday that they would not, as expected, allow the agents to carry weapons.

This Special Agent can be proud that he likely saved lives from America’s terrorists.

At the polling station, James Smokie Phillips, the Constable (sheriff) for south Houston, says he will not tolerate lawbreaking, even by feds with badges who might cross that orange line.

His natty purple plainclothes suit covers his ability to enforce Texas law. Constable Smokie says with a quiet laugh, “I’m packing heat.”

Palast will be reporting live from Texas for the Thom Hartmann Program at 1pm Eastern

Greg Palast Investigates

Investigative journalist and author of the NY Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse + The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. See my latest film at: https://WatchVigilantesInc.com

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It’s Election Day and if you believe the polls both Democrats and democracy itself are heading for a very good night. The final generic ballot averages show Democrats about 9 points ahead, which is the widest margin by which either party has carried a midterm in years.

And while I hope those numbers hold up — or even turn out to be conservative — I’m haunted by the last week of October of 2024 when Kamala Harris had a solid 4-point lead over Trump in the national polls but still lost the election by an average of 2.7 points, a spread of almost 7 percent. Fully sixty percent of the 81 national polls taken in the final two weeks before the election had Harris winning big.

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According to the pundits, there are a zillion “reasons” for the big spread between the polling and the final vote (she also lost the popular vote by about 1.5%) but the biggest variable has never been included in the polling and should be: voter purges by Republican secretaries of state in Red states with large Blue cities.

The pollsters blamed the usual suspects: bashful Republicans, people who don’t answer the phone, Hispanic voters were mis-modeled, people who skipped 2020 finally showed up for Trump.

But there’s a much simpler explanation for this “red shift” sitting in plain sight that Greg Palast reported here in January, 2025: Republicans have been purging Democrats from the voting rolls like there's no tomorrow. He wrote about it here: “Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.”

Greg used the federal US Election Assistance Commission’s own official numbers and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls in the months ahead of that election. More than 2.1 million mail-in ballots were challenged by Republican poll watchers claiming “irregularities” like mismatched signatures (people forgot to include their middle initial, signed in a hurry, etc.: the GOP trains their poll watchers to look for these mail-in ballot “errors” in Blue cities). And roughly 2.1 million people cast a “provisional” ballot thinking their votes would be counted but they never were.

Based on those official numbers from the US government and the states, he calculated a “suppression factor” of 2.3% of the total 2024 vote, and that hit was almost entirely concentrated among Black, Hispanic, college town, and urban voters; without that voter suppression, Harris would have easily carried Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia and today would be President of the United States.

That 2.3% spread that gave the election to Trump (and to Republicans in the House and Senate) is pretty much identical to what the polling industry is still baffled by today because they’ve never, ever bothered to include voter purges (sanctioned by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) in their math.

This is the new Republican strategy that has exploded since 2000: simply knock out Democratic voters’ ability to vote or have their votes counted while claiming you “must do it to prevent non-citizens from voting.”

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Donald Trump may be about to escalate to an apocalyptic war to stay out of prison, and Benjamin Netanyahu may help him for the same reason.

As Alexander Willis wrote this morning for Raw Story:

“Panic spread late Sunday as a prominent conservative figure with deep ties to the Donald Trump administration warned that the president is just days away from deciding whether to use nuclear weapons in his deeply unpopular war against Iran.”

Three weeks ago I speculated here about Trump’s willingness to provoke a 9/11-style attack against America from Iran after he publicly speculated about letting them “take out” LA and San Diego.

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Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above to restack “What You May Have Missed” on Notes.

Every restack — which is free, and you can add comments to it — puts this info in front of readers that the billionaires’ propaganda machine (whose social media sites have all shadow-banned me) would rather you never see.

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Friday’s Daily Stack…

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COMMONWEALTH REPORT

ADHD: HUNTER IN A FARMER’S WORLD

ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World with Thom Hartmann

It’s Not the Hunter Trait That Kills You: It’s the Farmer’s World.

Back in 2015, a team of Danish researchers followed nearly 2 million people and reported in the British medical journal The Lancet that an ADHD diagnosis roughly doubled the risk of dying early. The statistic has been quoted so many times it’s become conventional wisdom, and I’ve lost track of the number of people who’d thrown it at me. Not to mention worried parents of Hunter kids…

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WISDOM SCHOOL

The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human

Could Eating Dinner After Dark Be Slowly Destroying Your Health?

Last week, I wrote about why permanent daylight savings time like the golf industry is pushing in the Senate right now would be a disaster for our biological clocks. Since this coming weekend the clocks will “fall back,” now’s a good time to also look at how our shortening days influence when we should be eating dinner…

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The Slave Patrolers Wrote the Second Amendment

Every argument about gun control and safety in America eventually runs into the thirteen words that open the Second Amendment:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...”

The gun lobby would like you to ignore those words, but they’re the key to understanding where this amendment came from and how it’s been twisted by Republicans on the take from the weapons industry for over 50 years, including those on the Supreme Court.

In reality, they’re essential and the men who wrote them knew exactly which militia they meant.

This week’s excerpt pulls together three short chapters from the heart of the book.

The first chapter explains what the southern “militias” identified in the Second Amendment were actually doing when the Constitution was written. Instead of fighting the British or the Indians, they were called “slave patrols.” Laws in Georgia and the Carolinas required the slave patrollers to ride through the region and inspect slave quarters every month searching for weapons and brutally whipping any enslaved person found off the plantation.

The second chapter explains how Thomas Jefferson’s lifelong fear of standing armies — a fear he’d acquired from studying Europe’s long history of military coups — was why his protégé James Madison was drafting an amendment about militias in the first place — one that originally had nothing to do with slavery.

And the third chapter follows that draft of the Amendment into the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788, where two famous “founding fathers,” Patrick Henry and George Mason, laid out on the record what was really going on. They were afraid that a future anti-slavery president (like Abraham Lincoln; they were prescient) might use the Constitution’s military impressment powers to strip their states of their slave patrolers, leaving them vulnerable to Black revolts.

Madison, a slaveholder himself, called Henry paranoid, then went back to his draft and changed one word that shifted everything from avoiding standing armies and toward protecting the slave patrols. I’ll let the chapters tell the rest.

From The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, Chapters 8, 9, and 12.

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How Slavery Laid the Foundation of the Second Amendment

I think slavery is the next thing to hell.

—Harriet Tubman to Benjamin Drew, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, 1855

Europeans used guns and formed loose militias to wage a genocidal war against the once-thriving Native American population in North America. Militias in the South at first served the same role, but as the American frontier pushed westward, the role of local militias shifted.

By the mid-18th century, rich plantation owners located east of the Appalachian frontier were generally protected by the British military, which enforced the treaties between Native American tribes and the British empire.

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— Corruption has become the midterm issue the pundits never saw coming, and it has Trump’s name all over it. For years I’ve been ranting at Democratic politicians and strategists that corruption is the most powerful meme they can use against the GOP. (From 2021 when I started this newsletter to 2022 to at least a dozen articles since including this year.) They finally noticed that the public has always agreed with me because multiple pollsters finally got around to asking the question. The Financial Times reports that corruption now ranks among the top concerns pushing Americans to the polls this year: the FT/Focaldata poll found 69 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Trump’s own 2024 voters, are worried about “corruption, self-dealing, or conflicts of interest” in his administration. A Fox “News” poll — which has to be alarming Republicans — found government corruption had edged out inflation as voters’ single biggest worry. Gallup says 89 percent of Americans now believe corruption is widespread in the Trump regime, a number that’s jumped up fully ten points from an already mind-boggling 79 percent in a single year. And a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll found about a third of Republican-leaning adults now say Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself. The challenge now for Democrats will be to follow through and actually work to drain the swamp when so many of their own “moderate” elected officials are also on the take (since political bribery was legalized by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court). Progressives are leading the way by refusing corporate PAC money, often putting themselves at a disadvantage, but the simple reality is that publicly and loudly standing on principle while pointing out the other side’s corruption is the single most effective way to pull this off.

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— Citizens United Alert! Corporate cash in our elections has exploded by more than 5,000 percent since five Republican justices opened the spigot. The year that five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 (Citizens United) that there was nothing wrong with corporations buying judges and politicians, corporations spent a mere $12.8 million on federal elections. This year, Public Citizen reports, they’ve spent more than $737 million. And the most corrupt and sensitive-to-regulation industries have been at the front of the line: More than half of this cycle’s corporate money, $391 million, came from crypto, online gambling, and Big Tech, including the AI and data center companies currently begging for tax breaks and cheap electricity.

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The AI bubble and it’s possible disintegration gives us some pretty grim insights into the question of what happens when the richest people in the world rebuild the economy in a way that it no longer needs working people, but still expects them to pay their bills.

Reuters reported this week that China’s AI and semiconductor stock boom has suffered a sudden and staggering reversal: their STAR50 index of Beijing’s AI and chip champions (like our NASDAQ) has plunged 40 percent in less than four months, wiping out roughly $480 billion in market value.

Their robotics company Unitree, whose IPO just three months ago was oversubscribed 8,000 times by Chinese small investors and has lost half its value. Dong Baozhen, a Beijing fund manager, told Reuters:

“And now we see the bubble bursting.”

The same day (Monday) here in America Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, about 27 percent of its global workforce, as it’s planning to replace them with AI. And when Anthropic (Claude) filed to go public they disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss and some $657 billion in infrastructure deals with companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and SpaceX; fully $498 billion of that is noncancelable even if the company never uses the computing capacity it’s reserved.

Things got even weirder on Wednesday, when Microsoft and Alphabet reported some striking “earnings” numbers. Alphabet burned through $9.1 billion in free cash flow for the second straight quarter. NPR’s 1A tallied up Monday’s AI deals alone at roughly $235 billion, nearly one percent of American GDP, all in just one single day.

While Wall Street has been pouring massive sums into AI companies, data centers, chips, and power infrastructure, Economist Dean Baker reports at his weekly AI Bubble Monitor that CoreWeave’s debt (the company rents computing power to the AI giants) is now considered so deep in junk bond territory that they’re having to pay 16% interest on their long-term debt to get investors to bite.

News for People, Not Power

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double. Not only was his “Moore’s Law” right, but as the power of digital hardware increases, costs also reliably drop by a similar factor.

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Reporters for MS NOW just broke an extremely troubling story: seven people inside and around the FBI reached out to say that they’re afraid that in the next week they’ll be called upon to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt our election next week.

They all know that federal law has made it a crime for federal law enforcement officers to enter polling places armed (unless there’s an active crime, like a shooting, going on), and has been since 1865, which has them particularly worried about their own possible legal exposure.

Several also noted that what makes this concern particularly cogent and urgent is that they’ve already watched Trump’s and Blanche’s Justice Department use invented claims of “irregularities” to get a judge to sign a warrant that allowed them to march armed agents into Georgia election offices on national television with little blowback and no consequences.

One former senior agent told the reporters how the Bureau used to handle this:

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