Good evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America. Make sure to click the ❤️ and tap the restack icon if you’re watching this on Substack. That’s what helps us make sure these critical stories get in front of the most people.
Tonight, White House officials say there are already a few Cabinet secretaries that Donald Trump may end up throwing under the bus as scapegoats for Tuesday’s midterm wipeout. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is hoping to use the upcoming lame duck session to ram through another Republican FCC commissioner before Democrats take back control of the Senate. In ruby-red Montana, a 32-year-old smokejumper just became the first Democrat the Big Sky State has sent to the House of Representatives in more than 30 years. And voters across the United States last night delivered an astonishing rebuke of Big Tech by voting down both data centers and the politicians who pushed for them.
**A quick request before we go further: **new Democratic majorities are about to be sworn in and conducting investigations into top Trump administration officials. We’ll be on the ground covering every new development. Our Capitol correspondent Luke De Cresce is already speaking to the incoming committee chairs in the House and Senate. Our White House correspondent Brian Karem is working his sources to find out the president’s moves. Our managing editor Carl Gibson will be lining up interviews with the new Democrats leading the fight.
Donald Trump reportedly never came downstairs on election night. The Daily Mail reported Wednesday that while various Cabinet officials, advisors and MAGA activists watched election returns in the East Room of the White House last night, the president remained in the private residence with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and his intensely devoted 35 year-old aide, Natalie Harp. First Lady Melania Trump was apparently not with her husband last night.
As the blue tsunami began to materialize, the East Room gradually emptied out. Senior staffers were among the first to leave, followed by members of the Trump Cabinet. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was there early on but disappeared later in the evening. By the time the House of Representatives was officially called for Democrats around 10 PM Eastern Time, most of the attendees had deserted the White House and headed to a nearby bar.
One senior official described the mood in the White House’s private residence as “very, very dark.” One Trumpworld source told the Daily Mail that by 11 PM Eastern Time, the president was hate-watching Fox News in almost complete silence. In a series of screeds posted to Truth Social, the president made sure to lay blame at the feet of Fox News for Republicans’ losses. After Republicans officially lost control of the U.S. Senate, Trump launched into an attack on ousted Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, calling him a “RINO” despite praising him as “exceptional” just a few hours prior.
In the aftermath of the blowout loss, White House officials were already trying to decide on who to scapegoat for Republicans’ apocalyptic results. Some pointed the finger at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, insisting the GOP’s reckoning was entirely due to Trump’s war with Iran. That’s not a bad conclusion, given that the war has cost American taxpayers at least $47 billion due to higher inflation, gas just hit a new record high of $4.15 a gallon on average and most Americans tell pollsters they view the war was a gigantic mistake.
One White House official confided to the Mail that last night “would have looked very different without the Iran War,” and predicted Trump would ultimately throw Hegseth under the bus. One anonymous GOP donor even suggested Rubio’s tenure as secretary of state was finished, along with the careers of every Republican who endorsed Trump’s foreign policy decisions.
Other officials believe Susie Wiles is most at fault. One of the Mail’s sources said she had been doubling down on her claims that Republicans would hold their majorities as recently as September. Some staffers in the West Wing were apparently still under the impression that they would even gain some seats in Congress as of Tuesday morning. That source said Wiles and those staffers were “delusional right until the very end.” But Wiles is a little more difficult to fire, as she’s responsible for building virtually all of Trump’s political machine, including the current chair of the Republican National Committee to the Cabinet and the PACs supplying the GOP with funds. One official said anyone Wiles tried to blame for last night would be someone she installed herself.
Ultimately it all comes down to who the president decides to shackle with the blame. If he scapegoats his own political operation, Wiles’ head may be the first to roll. If it’s due to the war, then Hegseth and Rubio could be shown the door very soon.
The 119th Session of Congress is preparing to gavel back in one last time for its lame duck session, and Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is make the most of his final two months as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. ArsTechnica is reporting that Cruz aims to enshrine a far-right MAGA majority on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) before the new Democratic majority is sworn in.
Cruz has reportedly scheduled a November 10 nomination hearing for Danielle Thumann Severs, who is a Trump FCC appointee currently serving as senior counsel to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. If she’s officially confirmed by the lame duck Senate majority, Republicans would have a staggering 3-1 edge on the FCC, which would almost certainly become 3-0 by the end of 2027, as Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez would have to leave unless Trump renominates her.
A lopsided Republican majority on the FCC would also likely embolden Trump’s attacks on cable networks that run programming criticizing his administration, with ABC and Disney already suing the Trump FCC over its unprecedented early license renewals for its affiliate stations.
The Communications Act is clear in that there can only be so many commissioners appointed by a president from one party. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon (** who Raw America interviewed in August**) has warned that an all-Republican FCC would be illegal under federal law, and that every license renewal, spectrum transfer and equipment certification the body approved may end up being thrown out by the judiciary. Wyden also wondered whether the president could fire Gomez if Thumann Severs gets confirmed, leaving a three-member, all-Republican panel that barely meets the requirement for a quorum.
For decades, both Democratic and Republican presidents followed the norm of pairing nominees so the commission had an even partisan balance. Trump has of course abandoned that tradition. 21 House Democrats recently wrote to Senator Cruz and Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota asking that any Republican FCC commissioner be paired with a Democratic appointee.
Gomez has been one of the few voices in the federal government pushing back on Brendan Carr’s attacks on news outlets that Trump has targeted. Carr has also endorsed Trump’s efforts to curb criticism of his administration on broadcast TV, like on ABC’s The View. In a pubic statement, Gomez demanded that Congress restore the FCC’s public interest standard as an obligation to American communities and stop using it as a tool to apply political pressure on behalf of the White House.
Republicans did something similar during the lame duck session in December of 2020, confirming FCC commissioner Nathan Simington right after Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. This led to Biden’s FCC being deadlocked until 2023.
Montana voters made history last night, electing Democrat Sam Forstag over Republican Aaron Flint in the state’s Western U.S. House District. Flint officially conceded the race just after midnight local time. With 78 percent of the vote counted, Forstag was leading Flint by a margin of 51.5 percent to 45.7 percent.
The last time Montana elected a Democrat to the House of Representatives was in 1994, when Pat Williams was reelected. For perspective, that’s the same year Forstag was born. Williams’ daughter Erin was in the crowd of Forstag supporters last night in Missoula, saying nobody ever imagined it would take this long for the Big Sky State to send another Democrat to Washington.
Forstag is a 32-year-old seasonal smokejumper (a specialized firefighter who parachutes into remote areas to extinguish wildfires before they spread) who embraced his working-class roots. The young Democrat’s campaign focused on expanding healthcare, raising taxes on the richest Americans, protecting public lands and passing new federal laws to constrain the development of AI data centers. Flint — a former conservative talk radio host and veteran of the Iraq war — got support from Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson last month. Despite those high-profile endorsements, it still wasn’t enough to get him across the finish line.
Forstag gave his speech in jeans and a large belt buckle, promising to hundreds of supporters gathered at his watch party that he would fight so every American can afford housing, healthcare, childcare and retirement on one income.
Tell Congress: Impeach Donald Trump!
That same data center issue Forstag ran on ended up being one of the biggest stories of the entire midterm cycle. Data center-related initiatives were on the ballot in more than 40 races in 13 states, and voters defeated them in at least 38 of those contests. Six cities passed outright bans on data centers development, while 12 put strict limits on how much power they can draw from the public grid.
The biggest data center casualty was Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott. The incumbent governor turned the Lone Star State into a playground for the AI industry, with more than 300 data centers operating in Texas and plans in the works to eventually double that number. His campaign also took in more than $9 million from donors connected to the data center industry. Then, when public opinion turned on data centers, Abbott tried to save face by announcing a new “pause” on data center construction. But according to 404 Media, Texas’ state regulators continued to approve them anyway.
Democratic Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa catapulted to victory by making Abbott’s support of data centers a cornerstone of her campaign. She used Abbott’s own promise to make Texas a hub for the AI industry in numerous ads. He ended up losing reelection by more than 700,000 votes — a landslide defeat for the man who had been governor since 2015.
The dat center backlash was even felt in small rural towns in deep-red states. In Burgin, Kansas, for example, a mayor who voted to approve a hyperscale data center project lost to a write-in candidate, despite that mayor’s name being the only one on the ballot. In Emporia, Kansas — where local police were once filmed arresting a teacher for clapping during a public meeting about data centers — banned them. And Yukon, Oklahoma voters recalled their own mayor who backed a data center project.
Michael Whitesides of the group Local Progress told 404 Media that the backlash is simple: people everywhere are tired of watching their utility bills skyrocket while billionaire-funded projects belch toxic air into the sky. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who reportedly spent almost $500 million on the midterms (and more than $220 million in Texas alone) posted on X last night that data centers in space were starting to look appealing.
Outlets like David Ellison’s CBS, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times all spent the better part of a year downplaying and dismissing talk of a blue wave. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X both actively suppressed stories like these on their platforms and allowed far-right disinformation to run rampant. And yet they were all proven wrong last night while independent outlets like Raw America never wavered in giving you the unfiltered truth.
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