Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
Oct 26, 2026
Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.
At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.
Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”
Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.
Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.
Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” [sic] begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.
The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.
Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.
On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.
The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.
Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion.
On Thursday a shareholder of a publicly traded U.S. crypto company sued Trump and his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. The lawsuit accuses Trump and the company “corruptly profiting” off more than $2 billion in crypto deals, including a deal that violates the Constitution’s prohibition on accepting gifts from foreign countries: a $500 million investment made by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and who manages a UAE sovereign wealth fund.
Today Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report saying that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” The report offered new information from Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, who says Trump used a pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City as a “hunting ground” to prey on young victims and that Trump raped her there in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.
At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”
And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.
Bill Allison and Dana Hull of Bloomberg reported on October 22 that billionaire Elon Musk, whose companies depend on U.S. government contracts, has poured at least $445 million (not a typo) into the Republican effort to keep control of Congress. That money is swamping Democratic candidates, who nonetheless are holding on to a significant percentage of the vote.
So, last Thursday, the Trump administration sued the state of Alaska and its election officials personally to try to stop the certification of the U.S. Senate election there if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. Unless the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, wins, the Department of Justice says, state officials must not accept the results.
The Republicans’ complaint is that a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the ballot, and they are currently claiming that if the Republican incumbent loses it will be as a result of voter confusion. But the Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected a Republican attempt to get Daniel J. Sullivan removed, and the Alaska Republican Party chose how to identify the two Sullivans: the incumbent is listed as the Republican incumbent while the other Sullivan is listed without a party affiliation.
On Friday, Trump told reporters that he, personally, demanded the lawsuit.
On Saturday, in an article in Politico titled “Facing an electoral wipeout, Trump goes after the system,” Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, Alec Hernandez, Samuel Benson, and Lauren Fedor reminded readers that under Trump, the Justice Department has tried to get access to state voter files—so far, it has lost every case—and Trump has vowed to refuse to distribute federal funds to state and local governments that won’t make the changes he demands in election procedures.
As Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times noted on Sunday, Trump has also tried to use the United States Postal Service to screen ballots with the potential for rejecting tens of thousands of them. Now the Justice Department is trying to force California election officials to set aside ballots it claims were sent to 20,000 noncitizens, warning the officials they could be prosecuted if they don’t help the federal government identify alien voters.
California officials said the federal government has no authority to oversee their voter lists and note that the federal government has made false accusations against states. In July, officials from the Department of Homeland Security publicly told Nevada officials they had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, but ultimately, they could not provide evidence of even one.
On October 22, Madeleine May of CBS News reported that ICE agents, armed and in uniform, are knocking on doors in at least six states—California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin—to ask residents about their immigration status and whether they have either registered to vote or voted in past elections.
It is a crime to vote in federal elections if you are not a U.S. citizen, and the number of times such votes are cast is vanishingly low. As May notes, since the second Trump administration began it has charged—not obtained convictions, charged—just 156 people out of 227 million registered voters.
But Trump has made the Big Lie that Democrats win elections only through fraud central to his hopes of keeping MAGA in control of the government, and he is weaponizing the government against his political opponents by using the idea of illegal voting as justification for trying to intimidate lawful voters. It is a tactic straight out of the Reconstruction South, when gangs of white supremacists, often organized as the Ku Klux Klan, visited Republican voters before elections to make it clear their survival depended on staying away from the polls.
Even so, the Alaska suit was a new level of election interference and may reflect the recently exposed story that the administration is backing the sale of a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska to a sanctioned Russian company. Such a plan will be harder to pull off if there is a Democratic senator in the state conducting oversight.
This transparent attempt to steal the election is unlikely to succeed in court, but it is another way for Trump to sow confusion over the elections and lay the groundwork for challenging a Democratic victory. This afternoon, Trump continued that effort by posting on social media a vow that sounded even more desperate than his repeated promises to pay Americans $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election,” he wrote, “will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!”
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American