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Donald Trump suggested during a rally last night in North Carolina that federal disaster aid would hinge on whether they voted for the Republican U.S. Senate candidate. A longtime Republican strategist who helped give us two Bush presidencies says he’s voting for a Democrat in November because his own party has embraced racism. A Republican running for reelection in a rural red state is now saying he doesn’t want Trump’s endorsement. And the United Nations has concluded that the Trump administration likely committed war crimes in Iran.
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Donald Trump held a rally for North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley last night. While he stuck to his usual attack lines like calling Democrats communists, he also brought up Hurricane Helene, which killed 107 people and destroyed more than 125,000 homes across the Tar Heel State two years ago. He reminded the crowd that more than $2 billion in FEMA funding had already gone toward helping North Carolinians rebound from the storm.
But then, Trump told the crowd there was more disaster money coming that the state is still waiting on. And then he said: “now if Michael loses, I’m not sending it, ok?”
He then tried to laugh it off, saying it was a joke. Notably, not that the money wouldn’t be held up, but that North Carolina would “get Michael.”
But jokes only work if everybody in the room understands there’s not really a threat behind them. Nobody laughs at a mugger just because the guy taking your wallet says “just kidding” afterward.
Trump has also been serious about withholding federal disaster aid throughout his second term. As of July, the Trump administration had already rejected $227 million in disaster aid requests from four states with Democratic governors. In June, the White House suggesred it could withhold Department of Homeland Security funds from states that didn’t make changes to their election systems that Trump specifically called for.
So when the president stands in front of a crowd and says a state recently ravaged by a Category 4 hurricane may not get badly needed federal aid unless the president’s preferred candidate wins, that’s no joke, but something a mobster might say when running an extortion racket.
Trump also told the crowd he planned to send $5,000 checks to every American adult if Republicans keep their majorities Congress after the midterms. He also warned that a Democratic win would result in what he called a massive depression. The president also referred to North Carolina cities as “blood-soaked killing fields,” exploiting the tragic death of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee who was killed on a train last year.
At one point during the speech, a heckler was escorted out, and Trump stopped his speech to find her in the crowd. When another rally attendee singled her out, Trump said she was going home to her mother, and predicted she’d get “the hell spoken out of her” once she made it home.
The whole speech was a rambling mess. But the disaster aid remark is what stands out, because it shows exactly how this president views federal disaster aid: not as a natural right for those who pay taxes and living in the United States, but as a reward for political loyalty.
Congress settled this all the way back in 1939 with the Hatch Act, written after relief officials got caught leaning on hungry families’ WPA paychecks to swing Senate races, and FDR signed it even though his own allies were the ones who got caught. A president who ties a storm victim’s roof to an election is reviving the exact machine politics Americans outlawed almost a full century ago.
One of the most influential Republican strategists in recent history is now sounding the alarm over his own party’s racism problem.
Karl Rove, who guided George W. Bush to two presidential election victories, announced in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that he’s voting for Jon Rosenthal, the Democrat in the Texas Railroad Commission race. That’s the agency that oversees the state’s multibillion-dollar oil and gas industry. His Republican opponent is a man named Bo French, who recently posted a racist comment reacting to a photo of University of Texas students celebrating the school’s win over top-ranked Ohio State last weekend. French complained the crowd, which was largely made up of students of color, reflected what he called a broader problem without getting into specifics.
French’s dog whistle was obvious enough for Rove, who laid out exactly why he’s switching party lines for just the second time in his life. He wrote that the GOP has “a growing number of Bo Frenches, and not only in Texas.” Rove warned of a rising faction within the conservative movement that trafficks in antisemitic conspiracy theories under the guise of just asking questions.
He also pointed a finger at misogynists obsessed with hypermasculinity who make outrage-focused content for profit. He also singled out religious bigots who can’t label all Muslims as terrorists. Rove warned that faction will be what dooms his party. Even Republican Senator John Cornyn has been publicly condemning French. but the GOP railroad commission candidate has doubled down, dismissed his critics as “less conservative people” during a recent interview on right-wing talk radio.
Rove has been slowly putting distance between himself and Trump. Earlier this month he criticized the president’s midterm approach and its failure to come to a peace agreement with Iran. He’s also not been shy about saying suggesting Trump’s constant self-aggrandizement and MAGA rallies are hurting the GOP’s chances in November.
Trump wrote on his Truth Social account that Rove, naturally, must suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and insisted the veteran GOP strategist has been wrong about him for the better part of a decade.
Karl Rove voting for a Democrat is newsworthy on its own, but the fact that he’s doing it not for policy reasons because his own party’s candidate is openly embracing racism is not a small thing.
Rove came up in the College Republicans alongside Lee Atwater, who admitted in a 1981 interview that the party had learned to deviate from racial slurs for coded language about busing, states’ rights and tax cuts. What’s scaring Rove now is that the Bo Frenches have quit bothering with the code, and a democracy made of every color and creed can’t survive one of its two major parties deciding only some of us count as real Americans.
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Kansas has a reputation of being one of the reddest states in the country, but the current Republican attorney general is now trying to keep Trump at arm’s length.
Kris Kobach is running for reelection as the state’s top law enforcement officer against Democrat Chris Mann, who he narrowly defeated in 2022. Kobach has been one of Trump’s biggest allies since 2016 and endorsed his first campaign. Trump went on to appointed him vice chair of his so-called “election integrity commission.”
But this time, Kobach says he doesn’t want the president’s endorsement. He explained that Trump can help Republicans win a primary, but that its value in a general election is dependent on his popularity. And even in ruby-red Kansas, Trump’s numbers are in the toilet. An August poll from YouGov and The Economist put Trump’s net job approval in the Sunflower State at-17, compared to -4 in 2024. This is despite Trump winning Kansas by double digits in three consecutive elections.
Kobach’s opponent is picking up momentum, winning endorsements from Kansas’ Democratic governor, more than a dozen labor unions and a bipartisan group of law enforcement officers. A spokesperson for Mann’s campaign said Kobach’s numerous failures have now gotten so bad to where his own allies won’t bail him out.
The Republican attorney general also made sure to note that his office has successfully sued the Trump administration. That includes Kansas joining a 15-state effort to block the federal government from enforcing specific gun registration requirements.
When grouping together Rove and Kobach, a clear pattern is emerging of staunch Republicans now viewing this president as damaged goods. Now, some GOP candidates are having to recalculate because of how Trump and MAGA have stained the party’s brand. Donald Trump just isn’t as popular as he used to be, even in deep red rural states in the American heartland.
Don’t mistake Kobach’s math for a conscience. Remember, this is the same man who helped run Trump’s voter fraud commission that folded in 2018 without finding the fraud it was built to find. History bears this out: Richard Nixon’s allies stood by him too, right up until the August day in 1974 when Barry Goldwater led a delegation into the Oval Office to tell him the votes were gone, and that’s how loyalty built on fear usually ends, with a head count instead of a change of heart.
A fact-finding mission by th United Nations is now saying the United States likely committed war crimes when it bombed a girls’ school in Iran earlier this year.
The mission examined two specific attacks from February. One hit the school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, including roughly 120 children. Investigators found the U.S. never updated its targeting databases on the school and never confirmed the building was actually a military objective before launching the strike. The report describes the failure as more than simple negligence, stating the U.S. moved forward while being acutely aware that there was a substantial risk its missiles would hit a civilian target.
The second strike hit a sports facility in the Iranian city of Lamerd, killing and injuring 22 civilians while also causing damage to nearby homes and a school. The U.N. concluded that strike was also indiscriminate and amounts to a war crime.
Trump previously told reporters this summer that an internal investigation found that “nobody” purposefully targeted the girls’ school. But Reuters had already reported that an initial military investigation found U.S. forces were likely responsible for the strike on the school in Minab. The Pentagon has since escalated its own investigation but has yet to release any findings to the public.
The same U.N. report didn’t just focus on the U.S. Investigators found that the Iranian regime committed multiple crimes against humanity during its violent crackdown on anti-government protests that kicked off late last year. The U.N. accused Iran of unlawful killings, torture of detainees, indiscriminate detention of political dissidents and state-sponsored forced disappearances. Investigators believe the real death toll from Iran’s crackdown on protesters is almost certainly much higher than the approximately 3,000 deaths Iran has officially acknowledged.
This is a rare case in which the U.N. is holding both the American government and the Iranian government accountable. But the report finding that a U.S. strike on a school full of children deserves the same scrutiny and coverage that any other country’s alleged war crimes would get in our press. But when most of American media is run by pro-regime billionaires, that kind of story tends to disappear fast.
The Geneva Conventions aren’t somebody else’s rules, because Article VI of our own Constitution makes every treaty we ratify the supreme law of the land. If these findings hold up, a missile that hit a school full of children because nobody bothered to update a target list is a matter for American law and American accountability, and not just for diplomats in Geneva.
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