Latest from HCR:
September 28, 2026 (Monday)
It has become routine for Trump to spend the weekend posting wildly on social media, and this weekend was no exception.
After attacking the press on Saturday morning, at 9:18 he posted a video with foreboding music that sped up as the video played, showing a glowering Trump walking down a hall toward the camera while his voice intoned: “This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
The administration clearly set out to provoke a backlash when it played what appeared to be the same ad later in the day during NFL games, Fox News Sunday, Saturday Night Live, and several college football games with the addition of the words: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
As Stephen Collinson of CNN noted, Trump often tries to provoke a response to his outrageous behavior in order to feed the narrative that he is under attack from an establishment deep state because he is trying to save the nation. And this did, indeed, provoke a response. While the White House maintained the ad was a “public service announcement,” Richard Painter, who served as a White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said using public funds for “government-sponsored propaganda” could be “an impeachable offense.”
That image worked well enough in his 2016 campaign that he recycled it for the 2024 campaign, when videos nearly identical to the one he posted on Saturday appeared repeatedly. But its power now seems to be primarily in its ability to reinforce Trump’s fantasy of himself. Thirty-six thousand social media users liked a post that read: “Why is there a Donald Trump ad during an NFL game when he’s not running for office and why is the US government paying for a political ad[?]”
Trump seemed to be working overtime on boosting his self-image on social media on Saturday, posting a series of videos showing a triumphal movie version of his second term, narrated by MAGA supporters. One video from2023 showed him attacking Democrats, other videos showed him winning his second term, setting out at top speed to fulfill his campaign promises, hosting the UFC mixed martial arts fight at the White House, and launching Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Still others intoned heroic literature, including “If” by Rudyard Kipling (that’s the one that starts: “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”) with Trump as the hero.
While the first video seemed intended to rally his supporters, the rest of the videos, with their litany of broken promises—“expel the warmongers”?—and the praise of supporters who have left or been cast out of the government, felt weirdly like a requiem.
And the ads created yet another headache for Republican lawmakers hoping to retain control of Congress after the midterm elections. On Friday the administration announced it is refusing to spend about a billion dollars Congress appropriated for programs that help the American people—a refusal the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) says is illegal—and on Saturday, Trump used taxpayer money for his own vanity ads.
That misuse of public money comes on top of the administration announcement last week that it was removing about 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act health coverage rolls, claiming they were fraudulently enrolled in the program and that cutting them and dishonest brokers would save $2.2 billion.
For the past week, Trump’s collapsing job approval numbers and the increasing chances that the Democrats will prevail in the upcoming midterm elections have dominated the media. In the New Yorker, Susan Glasser wrote about “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump.” She notes that “[n]o modern president has ever gone into a midterm election this unpopular.” His approval rating is now twice as low as it was in 2018 when Republicans lost forty-one House seats.
At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris reported on September 25 that only 24% of American adults say the U.S. is better off under Trump than it had been under Biden. Fifty-eight percent say it’s worse off, and most of them say it’s much worse. Morris notes that in the last month, Trump’s approval rating has fallen most sharply among voters who identified themselves as Republicans.
Today Morris reported that media coverage of the Republicans’ midterm convention failed to come close to the number of stories about the Iran war, about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and about the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Epstein files.
On Saturday, Patrick Thomas and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s tariffs that undermined the sales of agricultural products, his imports of foreign beef, and the rising costs of diesel, gas, and fertilizer have eroded his support in the agricultural areas that used to be the backbone of his support.
On Sunday, Samuel Benson and Eric Bazail-Eimil of Politico reported that Republicans in battleground states—Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Texas, and even Florida—are on defense as their voters turn against the ICE agents conducting raids in the states. An ICE agent’s shooting of a food delivery driver from Venezuela in Austin, Texas, on September 20 is highlighting the issue, especially since the agent was not wearing a body camera as required.
Like the tariffs, the raids are challenging the loyalty of even those who voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. Although voters in counties that depend on agriculture supported Trump by almost 78%, on September 24 the Kansas Livestock Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, and Texas Cattle Feeders Association released a statement warning that ICE activity is endangering their animals and operations, and has a “massive chilling effect” on “the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table and keep the cattle supply chain moving.”
In what appears to be a dig at the president, they note that their supply chains are already under pressure and call the raids “a costly and unnecessary impact to cattle producers already suffering from unwelcome political interference to both the markets as well as the physical supply chain.”
Rural areas, which tend to have more people employed in agriculture, fishing, and logging, as well as longer travel distances, are particularly hard hit by the high prices of diesel and gasoline caused by the Iran war. Yesterday, Gregory S. Schneider and Evan Halper of the Washington Post reported that the skyrocketing price of diesel has pushed Republican candidates even in staunchly Republican districts to call for an end to the war in Iran.
In Iowa, Representative Ashley Hinson, who voted four times against forcing Trump to end the Iran war and is now the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, is one of those now complaining about the high cost of gas and diesel. Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers of Michigan also previously supported the war but now is saying “[t]he war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.”
Republicans hoping to retain control of Congress after the midterms are fighting uphill battles in contested states, and some of their candidates are in the news for all the wrong reasons. In Maine the Portland Press Herald today published a scathing op-ed from the Editorial Board titled: “It’s Maine’s turn to be concerned about Susan Collins.”
The board ripped into Senator Collins's dismissive response to ProPublica’s story that her 2020 campaign accepted an illegal $150,000 contribution from a defense contractor in exchange for a U.S. government contract. Indeed, Collins’s attacks on ProPublica to undermine the story prompted it to issue a follow-up report calling her claims “incorrect and misleading.”
In Texas, some Republican leaders backed away from Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry in the state, after a racist social media post about University of Texas football fans, but it turns out that post is the tip of the iceberg. Today Andrew Kaczynski of CNN reported that in the past six years, French has repeatedly called for public executions of his political opponents, including former president Barack Obama, using the hashtag “HangEmHigh.”
Kaczynski reports that neither Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection, nor the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, state attorney general Ken Paxton, has withdrawn his endorsement of French.
In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall is facing outrage after a New York Times story by Sarah Kliff on September 8 revealed that Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist, sued more than 700 of his patients for outstanding bills. Kliff reports that Marshall’s office charged patients an 18% annual interest rate and garnished their wages and their bank accounts, and that eighty-one of his patients were arrested for missing court dates. Most of those unable to pay their bills were from a rural county with higher than average rates of poverty and lack of health insurance. The unpaid bills were as little as $101.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are starting to blame Trump and his appointees for their unpopularity with voters. Although—or perhaps because—Republican senators confirmed a number of those appointees, they are now turning on at least some of them.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullins’s raids are unpopular with Republican lawmakers, but Burgess Everett and Shelby Talcott of Semafor reported today that Republican senators are fed up with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. A Republican senator told the reporters: “There are a lot of people that are really upset with the war in Iran and how it’s being played out. We feel it’s hurting our chances in the elections in the fall, and it seems rather haphazard.” The senator continued: “We don’t like what we’re seeing when it comes to the pulling of officers off of the promotion lists. We don’t like what we see with…indiscriminate firings of admirals and generals across the force.”
And Trump apparently can no longer command the attention of those who supported his MAGA agenda. On September 23, Neil Mehta, Brian Whitton, and Sabrina Rodriguez of the Wall Street Journal reported the results of their analysis of almost 70,000 hours of podcasts by right-wing creators. Mentions of Trump’s name have dropped nearly 70% from their peak before the 2024 election. Suggesting just how unpopular he is, the people still talking about Trump are his opponents.
On Thursday, Zach Everson, research director for Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project reports, a Trump company filed a trademark application for “TRUMP TV,” the new streaming channel the White House launched after Trump’s ban of reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus left him without television coverage for a day.
On Friday, Everson reports, “a Trump-owned company applied…to trademark ‘MAGA’ and ‘45-47’ for streaming apps, TV broadcasting, and news and commentary on politics and current events.”