Prime

Jezebel: ‘Fuck It, I’ll Kill Us All’: Kristina Karamo’s Ex-Husband Accused Her of Trying to Crash Car with Entire Family Inside

Arizona Republic: Billionaires have helped define him, but Blake Masters needs money (sub req.)

WaPo: Truth Social faces financial peril as worry about Trump’s future grows

Arizona Republic: Candidates for attorney general and governor call for Saudi Arabian water leases to be investigated and canceled

BridgeMichigan: Romance author Nora Roberts helps save MI library defunded over LGBTQ books

You may have seen reports about the ongoing tug-of-war or game of chicken between Peter Thiel and Mitch McConnell. In short, it’s about who picks up the tab for the campaigns of Thiel’s political proteges Blake Masters in Arizona and JD Vance in Ohio. Both campaigns are floundering and both need money badly. Given Ohio’s GOP advantages, even a floundering campaign leaves Vance still in a fairly strong position. But it wasn’t even supposed to be a contest. You can go to others for the inside gossip on the back and forth between the two men. I want to focus your attention on something more general.

There’s no question that Democrats’ chances in the midterms have improved dramatically over the course of the summer. From the point in May when Sam Alito’s draft of the Dobbs decision leaked to the press until now, the generic ballot average has shifted just over 3.5 points in Democrats’ direction. For the generic ballot average, that’s a big shift. But could the polls themselves be underweighting Republican strength? Like many others I’ve been figuring that Trump being on the ballot has been the key in recent elections. He and his party’s chances were underrated in 2016 and 2020. In 2018, they were pretty much on the mark. But Philip Bump of the Post and I were apparently both watching G. Elliott Morris’s Twitter feed yesterday when he noted that this wasn’t quite true. The national averages were on the mark in 2018. But at the state level key contests still underweighted Republican chances. Bump pulled the numbers himself and sure enough, that skew was there in Senate races in 2018 too.

One point TPM Readers have asked again and again is this: why did Trump court all this trouble when he could have just xeroxed the documents and given the originals back? There are a lot of good and not good potential answers to that question. But as the Times notes here, DOJ investigators aren’t convinced he didn’t. The attestation that Trump and his lawyers had turned over all classified information also included a promise that no copies had been made of them. So those claims are in doubt now too.

A new article in the Post suggests that Trump lawyers Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran both now face significant legal jeopardy in their own right and are now off the case. The article gets to this point in a somewhat meandering way. But the gist is pretty clear. Notably and in character for Trump, his attorneys appear to be in more imminent legal jeopardy than he is.

I’m getting a late start this morning because I was up quite late trying to make sense of the various facts, claims, allegations and more contained in the DOJ’s latest filing. And yes, the photo … When I first saw the photo across my Twitter feeds I thought: Oh this is someone showing a photo of what highly classified documents look like, with their stamped and color coded jackets. Then after seeing it a number of times it hit me: wait, that’s a crime scene photo of Trump’s haul! Right down to the tacky carpet.

Our team will keep you up to speed on the details but there are a few points that caught my attention last night.

There’s been quite a lot of coverage in recent weeks of Republican anti-abortion diehards running away from their positions in light of the Dobbs backlash. There’s been particular attention to Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters who scrubbed the portion of his site focused on abortion. But until today I hadn’t seen just how total a change he now claims to embrace all while still claiming not to have changed his position at all.

TPM Reader LS from Georgia …

Just to let you know I called Jon Ossoff’s office (Atlanta and DC), and got through. I guess nothing has changed. They said he supports The Women’s Health Protection Act, but won’t say what he would do regarding the filibuster. I explained I had 2 daughters with essentially no rights in Georgia. That we are unlikely to ever have 60 votes. But you know they are just taking the message.

Yesterday Rolling Stone published an article about President Trump and French President Macron. The ex-President has reportedly bragged that he had “intelligence” on Macron’s sex life. And these brags seems to coincide with documents seized from the ex-President’s estate which, according to the search inventory, contained a dossier of information about the French President. I’ve been particularly interested in this because a French expat fellow reader of ours has been focusing my attention recently on how the French far-right rumor mill went to town on this subject in 2017 when Macron was first elected. The French far-right and Trumpworld are all part of the same far-right, authoritarian, revisionist world, often more or less openly allied to Russia. People immersed in the world of French politics and the French far-right perked up immediately when they saw that item on the search inventory.

I want to recommend to you this piece on the global water crisis (a subset of the climate crisis) and how that plays out specifically in the American Southwest and the various areas fed by the fast depleting Colorado River. There’s so much that is easy to get horrified by as the climate crisis not only bears down on us but does so faster than even a lot of pessimists expected. It’s in our nature to think of politics as the present just indefinitely spread out into the future. But this piece, an interview with a water use expert, is a view into the radical changes coming for that whole part of the country. It’s certainly bad news for mega-cities like Phoenix which we’ve essentially built in the middle of the desert. But as this discussion makes clear cities aren’t even the main issue. Where the water really goes is to food production. And that’s about to change dramatically because no matter how politically powerful agro-business may be there simply isn’t enough water now to sustain it.