President Donald Trump's approval rating has hit a record low. Democratic enthusiasm levels are off the charts. The party holds a clear edge on the generic congressional ballot question. By most measures, the polls point to something like a blue wave this November. The question, for many, is whether they can be trusted.
A widespread cybersecurity emergency unfolded across the global internet Wednesday after security researchers and the PHP Foundation disclosed two critical vulnerabilities residing in the core runtime of the PHP programming language.
U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff is facing immediate backlash for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin as a "humanitarian" after he released 74-year-old Stephen Hubbard, an American who had been imprisoned in Russia for four years and who had been determined to be wrongfully detained. "You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian," Witkoff told Putin Wednesday in response to Hubbard's release. "You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again." Witkoff made the comment in St. Petersburg during a visit with the Russian president that was aimed at moving toward a resolution of the Ukraine war that Putin started four and a half years ago. Read more
President Trump on Tuesday again complimented the backside of Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), something he has done multiple times on the campaign trail as the midterms near. "I looked at his a, and then I looked at his legs, and my " I said, His a is like, it's like a pile of muscle.' Then I looked at his legs, and I said, Man, his feet are big,'" Trump said during a rally in North Carolina, talking about Husted, who is locked in a tight race with former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Trump's approval numbers are at record lows as voters are angry about the war in Iran and the resulting rise in gas prices and overall inflation. Corruption in government is also a top concern down the midterm homestretch.
A Venezuelan billionaire secured a pardon from President Donald Trump after his family gave Trump's former attorney at least $50 million, The New York Times reported on Tuesday night. Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian businessman, struck a lenient plea agreement in August 2025 after being accused of attempting to bribe the governor of Puerto Rico in 2022. Herrera ended up pleading guilty to one misdemeanor campaign finance violation. Early this year, Trump pardoned him altogether shortly after Herrera's family arranged for Habba to join a law firm that was registered in 2025. The Times said Herrera deployed his attorney, Christopher Kise, who was previously Trump's personal lawyer, to help lobby for the pardon. Herrera's daughter, a U.S. citizen, had given $3.5 million to a Trump-connected super PAC.
"These schemes siphoned millions from taxpayers and robbed struggling Americans of the benefits they depend on, so fraudsters could use them for their own selfish purposes," U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said. The latest cases bring the amount of SNAP fraud identified by Vance's anti-fraud task force to approximately $641 million, according to administration figures.
Elon Musk has said he is actively considering merging Tesla and SpaceX, his two biggest companies. "Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said during a call with financial analysts to discuss SpaceX's latest results on Tuesday. While Musk noted it could not be assumed a merger will go ahead, and it would need shareholders' support, he said special committees within both companies had been formed to examine the move. "The special committees have not reached agreement on terms of any transaction and there's no guarantee that they will," he said. "But I do think there is a lot of merit to merging and a lot to be gained." With Tesla valued at roughly $1.5 trillion (1.1 trillion) and SpaceX at $2 trillion, a combination of the two companies would mark one of the largest mergers in history.
Trump also tied his promise to resolve the remaining claims to the outcome of next month's midterm elections, telling the crowd that Republicans must retain control of Congress. "If we don't win, there's no money," he said. "If we do win, you're getting it. It's gonna be finally over with that nightmare that's been going on for so many years. We will never abandon the heroes who served America."
Thousands of North Carolina midterm ballots are set to be rejected over minor technical issues after a federal court upheld strict new Republican-backed rules for mail voters, according to data shared exclusively with Democracy Docket. Some Democratic strongholds are seeing rejection rates as high as 7-8%, the data show.
We now embark on an election that astounds. It will decide, in North Carolina and across the nation, whether we are to live, as our forebears prescribed, in a free nation and society. Or, instead, whether we will surrender our heritage, mission, and birthright, in favor of a government of corruption, venality, brutality, and despotism. The Declaration of Independence set forth our national aspirations, our defining charge. It also said, after listing a long set of George III's compact-breaking transgressions, that "a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." Unfit he is. This all know. All.
Trump is back in his happy place, out on the campaign trail, voicing whichever disconnected thoughts crackle and fizz through his frontal cortex. His favorite rhetorical theme lately is an unexpected one: the official presidential dreamboat rankings. In multiple rallies, Trump has gone on and on about the relative hotness of male politicians, soldiers, and even protesters. As a result, people on the internet have diagnosed him with a novel medical condition: gay dementia. After putting in a solid shift in the heterosexuality mines, has the former beauty-pageant proprietor now become so disinhibited that he can no longer repress his thirst for man-flesh? Read more
"The world should accept some bad things happening," Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, "for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency."
Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it's incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things.
Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections.
People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.
Fasten Your Seatbelts 2026 could be the beginning of the end. Read more
The BBC has subpoenaed Jack Smith as part of Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the media company.
Trump is setting in motion a series of events to invalidate and coerce the outcome of the midterms. If he succeeds, the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.
Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a version of SpaceX's Starlink that Ukraine has relied on in its war against Russia, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter.
Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, last week "capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network," the Journal reported. The decision left some Ukrainian drones virtually inoperable, according to the newspaper.
Musk and President Donald Trump, who have both recently criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, discussed the move to throttle Starlink "soon after" the change first became public last week, two people told the Journal.
One of the people who spoke with the news outlet claimed that Musk discussed the matter with multiple senior Trump administration officials, including the president himself, prior to imposing the Starlink speed cap.
