Most weeks for this column, I take one big story and pull back to show the larger picture. Today I’m working in the other direction, taking a snapshot of the past week’s headlines and walking through how, taken together, they tell a single story: a Republican Party in crisis, with 35 days before the midterm elections.
These headlines help explain the abysmal numbers now making their own headlines. Trump’s disapproval rating reached 60.4 percent this week, his worst mark across both terms. A top Republican strategist advising several federal campaigns told Axios, “It looks worse than 2018 now.” A new Emerson College poll has Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot by a striking 11 points, 53 to 42 percent. The news is even worse among independents, who backed Trump in 2024 and now favor Democrats 60 percent to 31 percent. Even Republicans are wavering: Trump’s approval among them fell nine points, from 82 to 73 percent, in a single week of Reuters/Ipsos polling.
Trump, backed by Republican allies in Congress, has made a string of truly damaging choices, and the results now belong to the whole party. Rather than admit their mistakes and attempt to fix them, Republicans are blaming everyone else and, in some cases, acting astonishingly tone-deaf.
On Saturday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino posted a six-second, AI-generated video. In it, Scavino rides a gold luggage cart down a fictionalized White House corridor with his wife, Erin, and Lara Trump as Eric Trump pushes. Scavino sprays champagne to Pitbull’s “Don’t Stop the Party,” and President Trump greets the group at the end.
Frat-boy antics aside, many saw it as a big middle finger to struggling Americans. Some of the sharpest criticism came from the right.
“This is precisely the midterm messaging the GOP needs from the Deputy White House Chief of Staff,” Jonah Goldberg, the editor in chief of the center-right Dispatch, wrote sarcastically. On Sunday afternoon, Scavino answered the backlash with another AI-generated video of the imagined afterparty. “…as the typical nutters are losing their s--t over AI created content, well done! It is AI, correct?” he 𝕏posted.
The imagined celebration followed a real one: Thursday’s state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping, Xi’s first state visit to the United States in more than a decade. On Instagram, Scavino called his video his “post State Dinner party.”
The irony runs deeper. A White House fact sheet on Xi’s visit, released Friday, noted that Trump “urged President Xi to increase production of refined petroleum products to stabilize global supply.”
But it was the United States that disrupted that supply, driving up prices that are now devastating consumers, shippers and rural families. On Monday, AAA put the national average for diesel at $6.45 a gallon, compared with $3.68 a year earlier. Diesel first crossed the psychologically important $6 mark in mid-September before spiking even higher. The surge arrived just as farmers entered harvest, the most fuel-intensive stretch of the agricultural year. The USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses of roughly $22 billion this year, up nearly 29 percent from 2025. The American Farm Bureau Federation expects farmers to operate below break-even again.
Carrie Prejean Boller, a former Miss California USA and longtime Trump backer, addressed Scavino directly. “Many Americans can’t afford groceries, gas or their mortgage payment, and you post a tone deaf AI video of you and your buddies partying at the People’s House.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson wasn’t having a very good week, either. On Fox Business on Monday, host Cheryl Casone asked him about opposition to data centers.
“Don’t buy it. It is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. It’s not a conspiracy theory. I think they’re pushing those ideas,” he said, dismissing the widespread public backlash against data center projects across the country. Johnson cast the backlash as a Democratic ploy for the midterms.
This is how the GOP turns a kernel of truth into a full-blown crisis. Foreign influence operations have in fact targeted the debate over data centers. In August, Elon Musk’s X platform claimed it had identified about 200 accounts, within a suspected Chinese bot farm of roughly 200,000, whose posts could manipulate the American debate over AI and energy policy. But Jessica Brandt, a former Office of the Director of National Intelligence official who tracked foreign influence efforts, emphasized to The New York Times, “Foreign actors aren’t manufacturing American debates over the future of A.I., they are exploiting them.” Jim Prosser, a Silicon Valley communications consultant and former head of corporate communications at Twitter, put it more bluntly: “If you can get both Greg Abbott and Kathy Hochul agreeing on something, it’s probably not a Chinese psyop, it’s probably not a mass delusion people are having on these issues.”
The “psyop” explanation was already making the rounds among tech investors that month and has landed one of its promoters in federal court. Kevin O’Leary, the “Shark Tank” investor behind the proposed Stratos data center in Box Elder County, Utah, went on Fox News and accused local opponents of operating as “two cells inside of Utah” on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. He later posted that he had no evidence tying them to China, and Fox News apologized. Two of the people he named have sued him and the network for defamation.
The real anger isn’t manufactured in China. It comes straight from people who live next to these facilities. As I noted in The Big Picture in August, neighbors have complained of diesel generator fumes and the constant hum from cooling systems and fans. Backup generators at some sites reach 105 decibels. A Meta facility in El Paso is projected to draw about 480,000 gallons of water a day on average, and as much as 2.5 million on the hottest days.
Then come the bills: The average residential Georgia Power bill rose more than $43 a month between 2022 and 2025, an increase utility watchdogs have tied in part to building out the grid for large data center customers.
Voters have already punished Republicans over data centers. In Utah, state Senate President J. Stuart Adams, one of the most powerful Republicans in the state, lost his June primary after backing the Stratos project near the Great Salt Lake. Lee Perry, a former Box Elder County commissioner who was defeated over the same project, was blunt about the cause: “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do.”
Much of the opposition comes from Johnson’s own Republican Party. A Fox News poll released last week found that 71 percent of voters oppose building AI data centers in their area. A July survey reported by The Hill found 60 percent of Republicans, and even 53 percent of MAGA Republicans, opposed to a data center near them.
In Ohio, Nvidia agreed in August to guarantee up to $105 billion in land, lease and power obligations for a single OpenAI campus, with no accompanying commitment on ratepayer costs. At the time, Ohioans faced projected average summer electricity costs above $800, up 17 percent from the year before. The National Republican Senatorial Committee warned in a memo that same month that Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio could lose his seat due to voter anger about data centers.
The last thing Republicans want to talk about is how they went easy on or covered up for child sexual predators. Yet Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brought it up himself, right in the thick of a pitched battle for a U.S. Senate seat.
Defending his office’s involvement in a slap-on-the-wrist deal for a man accused of years of child sexual abuse, Paxton said, “The criticism has been that I let a child predator out, having one day. Well, guess what? They served 60 days. It wasn’t what we wanted, but we did not control that situation. We did our best to present the case. The jury decided what it was.”
Paxton was responding to an ad from his opponent, Democrat James Talarico, attacking his office’s handling of the case against Adam Hoffman, a former Waco attorney. The record contradicts him on every point.
Hoffman was indicted on a charge of continuous sexual abuse of a child, which carries a sentence of 25 years to life. After his trial ended in a hung jury, Paxton’s office declined to retry the case and instead negotiated a plea deal that reduced the felony to two misdemeanors. Under the initial offer, Hoffman would serve just one day in jail and avoid the sex offender registry. In his signed plea, Hoffman admitted to touching the child sexually without consent. When Judge Roy Sparkman balked at the one-day offer, prosecutors came back with 30. The boy’s mother appeared at sentencing to object, and Sparkman raised the sentence to 60 days and ordered Hoffman to surrender his law license for five years. Hoffman served just 29 days.
Talarico’s ad is part of a larger case against Paxton. “Ken Paxton is the most corrupt politician in America,” Talarico told supporters when he launched his general election campaign in May. He noted that the Republican-controlled Texas House impeached Paxton on corruption allegations in 2023 before the state Senate acquitted him. Talarico has likened the Hoffman plea to an “Epstein-style sweetheart deal.”
The victim’s mother voiced a similar sentiment, saying her son’s case “was treated differently because of who Adam Hoffman was and who represented him.” Hoffman’s attorney, Gerry Morris, also represented Nate Paul, the real estate developer and big Paxton donor at the center of Paxton’s impeachment. Paxton was accused of using his office to help Paul in exchange for favors, including a job for Paxton’s alleged mistress and renovations to his home. Morris has called any connection between his work for Paul and the Hoffman case “an absolute, total falsehood,” and has said Paxton played no part in the plea negotiations.
There’s also the cover-up angle. Paxton’s office has kept its records on the case hidden. In July, it rejected an open records request from Talarico’s campaign for communications tied to the plea deal, documents Talarico calls the “Hoffman Files.” This month in Dallas, Talarico appeared with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and accused Paxton of “a history of covering up abuse.”
The charge lands with a public already convinced that the powerful are shielded from the consequences of grievous crimes. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll in June, three-quarters of Americans said they believe the federal government is still hiding information about Epstein’s alleged clients. Eighty-four percent, including similar shares of Republicans, Democrats and independents, said the Epstein files show that powerful people in America are rarely held accountable.
On Monday afternoon in the Oval Office, Trump announced that Mesabi Metallics would build a $15 billion steel mill in Iowa. He was joined by Iowa Republicans facing competitive races, including Rep. Ashley Hinson, the party’s Senate nominee, and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, whose district will host the mill.
The show of unity masked an important break. Both Iowa officials standing beside Trump, who appeared to be dozing off at times during the event, had recently split with him over the war in Iran because of the toll it is taking on the agricultural economy of their state. Hinson had regularly voted against resolutions to limit Trump’s war powers, but last week she reversed course and called for an immediate end to the war. “Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” she wrote. Miller-Meeks, who had also opposed earlier resolutions, voted for one this month. “Americans do not want another forever war,” she [said](https://abcnews.com/Poli…
